


Deprivation

by AconitumNapellus



Series: Deprivation [1]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Hallucinations, Hurt Illya, Mental Illness, Psychosis, Sensory Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-25
Updated: 2016-11-25
Packaged: 2018-09-02 05:39:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8652970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AconitumNapellus/pseuds/AconitumNapellus
Summary: After an intense period of sensory and sleep deprivation at the hands of Thrush, Illya is left struggling for his sanity.(I've chosen not to use archive warnings, because even though there's no sex or real physical violence, the mental issues are quite intense.)





	

‘Listen to the birdsong, Illya. Listen. Isn’t it quiet? Nothing but birds in the whole world. Isn’t that wonderful?’

He stared up at the white ceiling, and listened to the birdsong. It was wonderful. It was beautiful. Such beauty in the natural world, such delicacy. The pointed delicacy of a bird’s beak, of the clear notes that fell into the air. Such beauty. The veins in a green leaf held aloft against the summer sun. Beautiful. And he could hear the birdsong. He could actually hear it, despite the white walls and the white ceiling and the white door that fitted almost seamlessly into the wall. He was going mad, but it was rather a beautiful thing, this madness. He thought if he could hear birds he could do anything. Perhaps he could play the piano. Yes. He thought of the Goldberg Variations and moved his hands on the keys, but the music sounded off, it sounded out of tune, and how ridiculous was that, for an imaginary piano to be out of tune?

And then that other sound started up, the sound that made him sick. It started as a resonance in the pit of his stomach, something he could barely hear. And then he could hear it, and he pressed his hands over his ears. And then it transcended hearing, and he curled over, his stomach lurching, and he pitched and tilted and his throat tightened and the sickness was all through him, in every cell, and he moaned in misery. And then he was vomiting again, and his throat was so sore from the vomiting, and the taste was never gone from his mouth. And then everything blinked out, and with no sense of passing time he was opening his eyes again, and the befouled corner of the cell had been cleaned, and there was a tray of food on the floor again.

He crawled to his knees and stayed there, blinking, staring at the food. A white tray which held a white plastic cup of white liquid, and a white plastic bowl with white food. Even his vomit was almost white, tinged greenish yellow with bile. They did this every time, every so often. He didn’t know how long the gaps were because he’d lost all sense of that, all sense of time. It could have been hours or a day, or half a day. He didn’t know. He didn’t even know if the gaps were regular. But they did that. They used that sound to bring him down and make him sick and then pass out, and then when he woke there was food. They must have calculated it to a precise point of misery versus survival. This whole thing was expertly calculated. They let him keep the food and drink in his system long enough so that he would not die of malnourishment, but they made him vomit every time before he got more. His stomach muscles hurt and his throat burned, but there was nothing to do to stop the vomiting. It was a carefully calculated pitch and even pressing his fingers into his ears didn’t do anything to stop it.

He picked up the cup and drank the liquid. It was thickish and had almost no taste, and no texture to speak of. It was neither hot nor cold. The bowl was the same. He didn’t know what the white stuff was, some kind of porridge or semolina or something, probably something very carefully put together to give him everything his body needed but give no comfort at all. The thick stuff had almost no taste, and although it filled him up it left him empty in every other way.

He knew all about sensory deprivation, of course. It was a well known torture technique. But he had never been subjected to it at this intensity, for so very long, in such a twisted form. The room was so white and so brightly lit that there were no shadows. If he walked about sometimes he bumped into the walls. The only things in the cell that gave his eyes any relief were his own body and the foul corner where he vomited and urinated and defecated when he had to, and that was cleaned every time he passed out, the smell nullified and the colours removed.

At first he had been bored, deathly bored. He had woken in this room and investigated the white jumpsuit, investigated the floor and walls, ran his fingers along the tight seams of the door. He had sat and waited. He had drummed his fingers and whistled and sent his mind along all sorts of tracks, waiting for someone to come. And then he had dropped asleep, and the harsh buzzer had woken him up, and he’d gained the first inkling that this was something more than just incarceration. But it was all right, at first. He could cope with it, at first.

He had sat there for the first few hours and it had almost been nice, aside from the lingering anxiety over what this captivity would lead to. He leant against the wall, not too hot, not too cold, and let his mind wander. He had thought idly about paperwork he needed to complete and when he might get some time in the labs, and if the latest physics journal would be in his mailbox when he got back. He thought about the evening out he had planned with Napoleon, a movie and dinner, and whether he would have to reschedule.

His hours leading up to this sudden capture had been stressed ones. He had been worrying about the mission Waverly was about to send them on and how on earth he was going to finish the paperwork for the last one. The city sounds had been loud and overwhelming as he walked along Canal and waking up in this place had been peaceful, at least. The capture hadn’t even been chaotic. Someone had just come from behind him and pressed a cloth over his mouth and nose that reeked of ether, and he had fainted, just fainted. That was all. He hadn’t even seen them, and hadn’t seen them yet. He hadn’t heard a human voice. All he had seen was this white, sealed, windowless room with its odd, slightly rubbery walls and floor and the light that seemed to come from nowhere.

But as the days stretched out into broken fragments of sitting, vomiting, eating, defecating, and being woken from sleep every time he dropped off, he had started to feel it all fall apart. There was only so long one could stay sane in isolation, only so long one could stay sane with no proper sleep. He had tried to stay strong, and then he had tried shouting for someone, and had tried curling up and weeping, but none of those things changed the dragging, awful intensity of his solitude and exhaustion.

He picked up the bowl and ate the slop in there, scooping out the last bits with his fingers and pushing them into his mouth, licking his fingers clean and then licking the bowl. He was always hungry. Then he put the bowl back on the tray and slid it to the corner of the room. He watched it there. White, white, white. He hated white. There were almost no shadows. It was as if the light came from the walls themselves, coming from every angle. The tray disappeared into the whiteness. It was like being lost in snow. Sometimes he looked at his hands and wondered why they weren’t white. Everything else was.

He lay down on the floor and curled around himself, picking at the soft white sleeves of his soft white jumpsuit. It was the only thing he wore. His feet were bare, and he had no underwear. But he was neither warm nor cold. The fabric didn’t irritate his skin. There were no buttons or zips, just a wide enough stretchy v-neck to allow him to slip the thing down when he needed the toilet. He had held on at first, shouting out for someone to take him to a toilet or bring him a bucket, but after a time he had known that he would have no choice, and that this was part of the terrible psychological deconstruction they were using on him.

Sometimes he wondered with dread what would happen in the end. What was their plan? Was this pure experimentation? Or were they waiting until he was so undone, so taken apart, that he would tell them anything just to be able to talk to someone, tell them anything because his mind was so unhinged that none of the interrogation resistance techniques worked any more. There was such a wealth of sensitive knowledge in his head. This treatment was extreme, but it would be worth it if they could get all of that from him.

His eyes started to drift closed. He was so tired, so, so tired. He was so tired that his eyes burned and his head ached and his teeth felt as if they were pushing out of his skull. He was so tired he felt nausea almost constantly in the depths of his stomach. He started to drift, and the buzzer sounded, a sound so harsh it felt like someone scraping him, and he woke with a jerking cry before he had actually fallen asleep. Sometimes, he thought, they let him sleep for a little. If he really hadn’t slept at all he wouldn’t still be alive or halfway sane. But it was never enough, never enough to stop this terrible exhaustion.

‘Please,’ he whispered. The walls seemed to soak up noise. He could hear himself, but there was no hint of an echo, and he sounded quieter than he should. He tried to shout, ‘ _Please!_ ’ but his voice sounded very quiet. He knew that pleading to be allowed to sleep didn’t work. He had tried it before. But still, he tried.

He sat on his haunches and wrapped his arms around himself and picked at the sides of the jumpsuit. He rocked slowly, rhythmically. If he rocked he could close his eyes but they wouldn’t think he was asleep. Anyway, the rocking was good. It was soothing, something he could do, something he could cling to.

He thought of those Goldberg Variations, his fingers arched over the keys, pressing down in perfect time. The music was beautiful. This time it wasn’t out of tune. It pressed through his head, and he found himself humming, _dah de dah de dah…_ but his voice was out of tune and his voice was cracked and weak, and it was all wrong.

He fell sideways because he had fallen asleep, and the buzzer woke him.

‘Listen to the birdsong, Illya.’

That was Napoleon, wasn’t it? He could hear him, but he looked around and there was no one in the room. He could hear his voice, as distinct as his own whimpering noises.

‘Look up, Illya. Listen to the birds.’

He looked up and watched them, little birds, perching on something he couldn’t see, maybe on wires that were so fine he couldn’t see them. The little sounds they made itched in his skull and fought with the piano music that he was trying to form in his mind. He watched the birds and saw them as notes on a stave and he tried to play the birds in his mind, and the sound they made was all wrong. He watched the birds drop off their invisible line one by one and hit the floor with little thuds, and he reached out to touch them, but they weren’t there.

‘Illya, why don’t you try listening to the left instead?’ Napoleon asked, and Illya swivelled to his left, tilting his ear, trying to hear the difference. He turned on his haunches, head tilted, listening and listening, but the birds weren’t any different.

‘Just to the left,’ Napoleon said. ‘A bit more to the left.’

He turned and turned, pressing his hands onto the not-cool, not-warm floor, trying to understand. He didn’t understand what Napoleon meant. Maybe he meant to the right, so he started to turn that way, and Napoleon snapped, ‘No, Illya. To the left. Only to the left.’

So he turned to the left, kept turning, and the birdsong didn’t change.

And then he fell again, and the buzzer woke him, and he pressed his hands over his face and scraped his fingernails down across his skin so hard that he cried out and saw blood and bits of rolled skin under his nails, and he dabbed the bits of blood onto the legs of the jumpsuit and gasped at the colour.

He patted his sleeve against his face and stared at the little wet red marks that were printed on there. Oh, he had found a way… He had found a way to make a mark, to make a difference in this place. There it was, the red against the white. It was a sight. It was a sight to see. Red against white.

There was something chattering and itching in the corner of his vision. He blinked and looked and saw them, saw the mass coming towards him, little things on little legs chattering towards him and flooding up over him, and they were all over his skin, their little legs all over him, and he screamed and scraped and flailed to get those things off him. Oh god, they were everywhere, crawling all over him and all over the floor and the walls, and he screamed and screamed and screamed…

He blinked and realised he had been gone. They had knocked him out. The food tray was gone and there was no blood on his clothes, and his fingers felt strange. He looked at his fingers, brought them close to his eyes, and saw that his fingernails had been pared down so low that he couldn’t scratch himself any more. He rubbed his right fingernails over his left arm, under his sleeve, and he couldn’t scratch at all. He couldn’t draw blood, just raise little blisters of blood under the skin. He sat for a while, rubbing his skin, watching it redden and the little dark marks appearing. His eyes started to drift closed. His fingers stopped on his arm. He was so tired… The buzzer sounded.

He looked at his feet, together on the floor. Pinkish gold, ten toes. Ten toenails, shaped like capital Ds on the ends of his toes, clipped right back to the flesh like his fingernails. He laid a hand on either side of his feet and looked at them too, contemplated the similarities and the differences, how his toes were short, blunt fingers, how his fingers were elongated toes. Pinkish gold against the white of the floor. He moved the joints and his feet seemed like strange, blind creatures. So strange. So odd. It was like saying a word over and over. His feet had become alien things with no meaning.

Oh, he was tired. He was so tired. His eyes were so dry and hot, and he was so tired, so…

 

((O))

 

‘Sir, I can’t believe Illya’s dead. I just can’t,’ Napoleon was saying. He was pacing back and forth, pacing back and forth, feeling as if he had itching in his palms and so much adrenaline in his system that he wanted to run.

Mr Waverly kept telling him to sit down, but he couldn’t sit down. He kept pacing between the great round table and the low leather sofa, that sofa where he had sat many times with Illya drinking martinis in the evenings, the table where he sat so often with Illya to go over plans or go through debriefing. Every way he turned, everything had Illya stamped on it.

‘Mr Solo,’ Waverly began, but Napoleon cut over him.

‘If he’d been killed by Thrush we would have gotten wind of it. They would have been crowing about it every chance they got. If any of our enemies had killed him someone would have said something, somewhere. I’ve got ears everywhere I can, no one’s heard anything, I just can’t believe he’s – ’

‘Mr Solo,’ Waverly’s voice cracked, loud and clear. ‘Will you _sit_ down?’

Finally, finally Napoleon obeyed. He took a seat on one of the tall-backed leather chairs and laced his fingers together on the round table. Even though he was sitting he still moved, gently turning the chair a little beneath him.

‘Mr Solo, you haven’t been listening to a word I’ve been saying,’ Waverly told him, fixing him with those pale blue eyes that must have seen so much through his life. ‘I am _not_ asking you to let this go. Mr Kuryakin has been missing for two and a half weeks, and that’s quite long enough. I’m not prepared to lose my best team of agents due to an amateurish kidnapping on the street.’

‘Sir – I thought you were suggesting I should – ’ Napoleon began, his mind whirling. But when he thought about it, what had Mr Waverly actually said? He had called him in here and he had spoken about the Thrush problem in Chicago and how it needed tackling, but he hadn’t actually suggested sending Napoleon in there, had he? No, he didn’t think he had.

‘I am suggesting, Mr Solo, that you brief Weston and Singh on the Chicago problem. They have to tackle a mission of this magnitude some day, much as I hate not sending my top team. But unless you recover Mr Kuryakin I’ll never have that top team, will I? Now, I have been sent some leads that give a suggestion as to who might have taken Mr Kuryakin. Once you have briefed Weston and Singh – and _only_ once you’ve done that – you can start following those leads. If Mr Kuryakin is still alive, I trust you to find him.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Napoleon said. He didn’t know what else to say. He had been driving himself mad for two weeks trying to fit looking for Illya around every other thing he had to do, alongside being forced to pair up with McKellan, who was as big a dunderhead as god had ever put on this earth. He missed Illya. He missed him as an agent and he missed him as a friend, and the longer his absence went on the more likelihood there was that he would never get him back.

 

((O))

 

‘So, how is our subject today?’

Dr Malta swept aside the detritus of the last night’s meal and poker game from the table with an expression of disgust. The place stank of beer and fatty food. It was so hard to get good attendants for a job like this, a job that was mostly menial and unpleasant. No one wanted to sit for hours watching a man trapped in a white room, looking out for self-harming behaviour and attempts to sleep, breaking the vigil every now and then only to clean up his vomit and waste and give him food. But the experiment was promising. It was so promising. Only four weeks in, and the subject already showed strong signs of depression, dissociation, and psychosis.

‘He’s been quite quiet,’ Eric Linaeker told him with a shrug. ‘He’s dropped off – oh – about fifteen times. I allowed him half an hour, once, as you ordered, but no more.’

‘ _About_ fifteen times?’ Dr Malta asked cuttingly.

Linaeker pushed the record book over to him. ‘It’s all in there, doctor. I noted everything down, each time it happened.’

Dr Malta took the book with a grunt, but he didn’t open it.

‘Clear up this table,’ he said, waving at the detritus on the surface. Then he turned to the television screen, leant his chin on his hands, and watched.

The subject was standing up for once. He was pacing across the small room, his head turning distractedly back and forth, his right hand reaching out. He didn’t seem to be able to see the wall, and only stopped when his fingers touched it. Then he stood there, scrabbling at the wall with his fingertips, his head on one side. Out of interest, Dr Malta switched to one of the concealed wall cameras. The subject looked quizzical. He moved along to the corner, feeling the wall, and started poking his fingers hard into the angle where the two walls met. Now, that was intriguing. He was using the corner to get a sensation. Maybe next time, Dr Malta thought, he would order the construction of a perfectly cylindrical room. That would be another set of stimuli and means of orientation taken away. The door might be hard to construct, but...

Damn, it was a missed opportunity. He hated that. He should have thought of it earlier. Perhaps he could use a round room on the next subject, though. He could order its construction now, and perhaps if this subject continued to be intractable he could move him into it at some point. Perhaps the change in itself, from square to round, would stimulate further deconstruction in the subject’s psyche...

The subject started talking and Dr Malta turned up the sound, then tutted in disgust. He was talking Russian again, or something like that. He rambled through so many languages. He sent the tapes off to the linguists, of course, but the subject had never said anything of import. It was all fascinating to him as a scientist, but it was nothing of value to Thrush’s upper echelons. Luckily his research and methods were respected enough that for now the upper echelons were content to wait.

He sat and watched as the subject turned and leant against the wall. He looked extremely tired, his face drawn. The area around his eyes looked bruised. He watched him as his body relaxed a little and his eyes fluttered closed, and he idly reached out to press the buzzer. The subject started, looking dazed, his eyes filmed for a moment. Then he rubbed his hands clumsily over his face and dropped them to his side. He stood there staring, just staring, and then tears started to overflow the edges of his eyes. He made no sound. His mouth gaped open. He sank to a squatting position and leant his head against the wall and whispered, ‘Please let me sleep...’

It was quite obvious to Dr Malta that he had no expectation of any chance that his plea would be granted, and he smiled. Such a human thing, to continue to plead even when all hope was gone.

The subject sat there, squatting, for seventeen minutes. The doctor noted it off carefully. It looked like catatonia, not sleep. His eyes were wide open. Perhaps it was the body attempting to emulate sleep. His eyes were completely unfocussed. It would be interesting to apply his sensing devices and see what electrical activity there was in his brain at these times; but that would disturb the perfect isolation, and he must let nothing do that. Then the subject started as if coming awake from a non-sleep, and said in English, ‘No, I can’t hear them. I don’t know where to look.’

It was always better when he spoke English because it was easier to tell just how much control he had over his voice, how much he was slurring and mispronouncing the words. His Russian accent was more pronounced than it had been at first, and his voice was weak. He had a tendency to slur over consonants.

The subject was looking up, looking around the room. Then he pressed his hands over his ears and screamed, ‘I don’t want to hear the birds, I want to go home!’

Then he calmed again, his head tilted, his fingers moving restlessly, and he started swivelling in a counter clockwise direction. Dr Malta noted that down too. The two things seemed to come together; babbling about birds and moving about counter clockwise, either in small circles or circling the whole room. He didn’t know what it was about, but he suspected that the subject didn’t either. He was obviously hallucinating, and Dr Malta felt wistfully how wonderful it would be to be able to see a television screen of what was going on in his head.

The subject was on his knees, and his head dipped suddenly in a way characteristic of sleep. Dr Malta pressed the buzzer and the subject jolted and rolled over onto his back and used his fingers to try to hold his eyes open. He rocked his head back and forth and then started to roll his body too in a rigid, repetitive motion, making small, wordless noises.

The next time the subject succumbed to sleep the doctor let him rest just until his eyes started rolling in the dream stage, then he pressed the buzzer long and hard, and the man jolted into disoriented wakefulness again. It was rather delicious watching him in this stage of utter disorientation. It took him time to separate the beginnings of dream from reality, and the period of disorientation got longer every time.

Yes, this whole thing was rather delicious. Watching a sane man unravel into madness was absolutely fascinating, and regardless of whether he got any valid information for Thrush, he would savour this experiment.

The man’s hands dropped from his eyes and he started crying again. Dr Malta grunted and turned back to the record book. Crying was so boring to watch.

 

((O))

 

He was lying on the floor and the ceiling was white and featureless above him. He couldn’t really see the ceiling, because it was just white. He couldn’t tell how high it was because he couldn’t see the corners where it met the walls. He stared up and imagined what it would be like to hear a real voice, a voice attached to a person, a voice that hadn’t started in his mind. He didn’t know how long it had been since he had heard a real voice. A week? Ten days? A month? Maybe it had been a year or a hundred years or forever. He had lost every real sense of time, and he hadn’t been allowed to sleep for more than a couple of hours, had no idea what was night and what was day. He wanted to hear a human voice. He wanted to hear someone real, even one of the people who had put him in here. He was so lonely, so alone.

He rolled over onto his front and pressed his forehead against the floor and closed his eyes, looking at the reddish blackness through his eyelids. And then the buzzer sounded and he tried to scream out, ‘ _I wasn’t asleep!_ ’ but his voice hardly made a sound. He rolled over onto his back again and forced his eyes wide so they could see he wasn’t asleep, and he wondered how they could see him, because he had looked for cameras at the start and hadn’t been able to see a thing. The air stung his eyes. He was so tired. He felt as if he were spinning. He felt so sick, he thought he was going to be sick, but he couldn’t, could he? He was only sick when they made him sick. He wasn’t allowed to be sick until they made him sick.

‘You really shouldn’t do that, Illya.’

He shook the voice out of his head. He was squatting in the corner, defecating, his back against the wall because he was tired, and it was easier if he could lean against the wall. He always used this corner, or he thought he did, but sometimes he got confused and thought maybe it was the other corner. He thought there was a slight stain on the white floor because he always used the same corner, but then sometimes he thought he saw a stain in one of the other corners, and he crawled around the room checking the corners, scratching at the floor, trying to find the stain. His stain. It was his stain. He hated it when he couldn’t find his stain.

The door was to his left. It was to his left. So this was the right corner, wasn’t it? It was his corner, his special place.

He pulled his jumpsuit up again and looked at the little pile of dark mess on the floor. The smell was rich and strong. He wondered how long he would be able to keep it, because it was his, wasn’t it? It belonged to him. It came out of him and had his heat and gave him something to look at. He stared at it because it was different to the walls and the floor. It was alchemy, wasn’t it, how his body made colours out of white? He remembered dotting the blood onto his jumpsuit, and he stared at that dark pile, and then he touched his finger into it, and it was hot like the inside of his body. Oh, that heat... He sank his finger up to the knuckle and felt the heat. The heat felt good, and the colour was so strong. He dotted it onto the white sleeves of his jumpsuit and looked at the darkness against the white. Then he pressed his hand full into it, and the smell billowed around him, and he pressed a palm print onto the white wall. _Oh!_ There was a mark. That was him. That was his print, four fingers, one thumb, his palm a square joining them. So he was alive, and there was his way to define the wall. He pushed his other hand into the brown mess and he made more prints, print after print, until the four walls were defined by his marks. That was incredible. He had managed to delineate his room. Four walls. Space. Distance. He dipped his finger in again and wrote, _I have won_.

 

((O))

 

‘He’s covered himself in shit. Jesus. Everything’s covered in shit. There isn’t enough money in the world for this...’

They dragged the subject out by his arms and dropped him on the floor. His head thudded dully on the concrete and Wilson said, ‘Hey, watch it. The doctor won’t be pleased if you damage him.’

‘Damage him!’ Eric was incredulous. ‘He’s covered in shit, Wil. Look at him! He’s fucking damaged already!’

Wilson huffed. ‘You know what I mean. He’s not supposed to be able to damage himself physically and we’re not allowed to beat up on him. God knows I would if I could, after sitting up through another night listening to him whine and moan and talk to himself.’

‘He doesn’t know if it’s night or day, he’s so screwed up. Well, you’d better get that jacket out,’ Eric huffed. ‘Dr Malta said he expected him to need it sooner or later. And we need to get him cleaned up, I suppose. Fucking animal...’

He called over a couple of other men and then went to get a pail of soapy water. He stripped the subject off and looked at him lying there on the floor, his pale straw hair and his thin limbs and the pathetic little bundle of his genitals. It amazed him every time. So this was an U.N.C.L.E. agent? This was supposed to be the elite force set up to foil Thrush at every turn? He didn’t look above five eight and his arms were like sticks, his muscles wasting away. He had the look of a little college professor, or maybe a student, even. He looked very young, younger than Eric knew him to be. If this were what U.N.C.L.E. had against them then it wouldn’t be long before Thrush had the upper hand.

He kicked the man lightly in the ribs, not hard enough to bruise. Just hard enough to give him some satisfaction. Then he knelt down and washed the shit off his hands and, grumbling, saw to the nasty business of washing him between the legs. Then he took the new clothes that someone had tossed down for him and started putting them on the unconscious man, starting with a diaper that gave him an uneasy feeling. It was that one thing that gave him pause. Men shouldn’t be reduced to that, should they? He wrapped it around the subject’s waist and fastened it, and felt revolted.

He shrugged off that moment of doubt and roughly dressed the subject in soft trousers and the straitjacket that did up down the back and had a strap under the crotch and fastened his arms tight around his body. He wouldn’t be painting his room in shit any more. Of course, now someone would have to change that diaper every now and then, and _that_ was something he didn’t look forward to, but maybe they could stretch that out for as long as possible, as long as the doctor didn’t find out. He certainly didn’t intend to spend time wiping shit off this man’s behind.

The other men were coming out of the cell with buckets and cloths, and the subject was starting to stir a little, and on no account could he be allowed to wake outside his cube, so Eric dragged him back inside without losing any more time, and slammed and locked the door. Really, the jacket and diaper were good. It would make so much less bother.

He settled down at the table and opened a beer. Fuck, his hands smelled of shit, even though he’d scrubbed them clean. He threw his feet up on another chair and tried to ignore the smell and raised the bottle to his lips, watching on the TV monitor as the subject stirred and moaned and came around. The subject was silent for a long few minutes, dazedly looking at his new clothes. Then he started to cry. Eric turned uncomfortably away from the screen and concentrated on his beer. No, he really wasn’t being paid enough for this.

 

((O))

 

The leads were there, but it was taking too long. It was taking too damn long.

Napoleon thumped his fist down on the desk in his office and McKellan looked up with a startled expression. What kind of agent was so easily startled? Everything about McKellan annoyed him, not least the fact that he was using Illya’s desk and Illya’s things. It made sense. Oh, of course it made sense. If they were partnered, no matter how temporarily, they needed to share an office. But Geoffrey McKellan was a large, blundering type of man, the opposite of Illya’s compact muscle and speed and mental acuity. McKellan wasn’t stupid, of course. He couldn’t be, not in this job. But few men matched Illya for wit.

‘What is it, Napoleon?’ McKellan asked.

Napoleon rubbed a hand over his forehead and grunted. ‘I just wish I could make sense of these reports,’ he muttered, stirring the pile of paper around on his desk. He had been working for three weeks following up leads, getting on planes just to spend a single night in a city interrogating someone, then flying back here and dropping more paper into the trash can and pulling new pieces of paper into their place.

He had an idea that Illya was somewhere relatively nearby. He wasn’t sure exactly how he knew that. It was some kind of mixture of something he was picking up from the reports, and agents’ intuition. He didn’t really believe in agents’ intuition, but he did, too. It seemed to work out.

‘I think he’s somewhere in New Jersey,’ he said. He pulled a map to the centre of the desk and stabbed at it. ‘Somewhere here, or here.’

McKellan pushed his chair – _Illya’s_ chair – back and came over to look. ‘Well that area’s just farmland, but this one – that’s industrial lots, isn’t it?’

‘Both have been known centres of Thrush activity,’ Napoleon said. ‘And there’s just a feeling. I don’t know. There’s something in the reports that have been coming out of those places that gives me a feeling.’

McKellan pushed back the side of his jacket to check his gun was in his holster. He was always doing that, and it drove Napoleon mad. How could an agent be discreet if he were always checking his gun?

‘Well, why don’t we move out now? Check those places out? Or ask a local team to check it out?’

Napoleon huffed. ‘Because wherever they’ve got Illya they’ve got him buried deep, and if we send someone to sniff around and they don’t find him but Thrush noticed them snooping around, we might be signing his death warrant. We have to take it slow and steady, Geoff. Softly softly catchee monkey.’

And Geoff just looked at him. Illya would have looked at him if he’d used that phrase with him too, but it would have been different. Just different.

 

((O))

 

He was lying on the floor again, and the room was clean and unscented, and he felt dizzy and odd. Had he been asleep? No, he hadn’t been asleep. There was no sense of time passed, no dreams. So they had had him unconscious again, and they had cleaned the room, taken away his marks. _His_ marks. _His_ room.

He stared into the whiteness. His clothes felt different. He looked down at himself and he saw that the clothes had changed, that this was not a white jumpsuit but soft trousers and a top that had long sleeves that came down over his hands and his arms were wrapped across his body and tied there. They had put him in a straitjacket so he could touch nothing, and he could feel the thickness of something around his groin. They had put him in a diaper and a straitjacket, and taken away his marks, and now he couldn’t make any marks at all.

He must really be mad now. He must be. They put straitjackets on mad people. Maybe he’d been mad from the start. Maybe this wasn’t captivity. Maybe this was a hospital. Maybe he’d really gone mad.

He started to weep. He moaned and rolled over onto his front and pushed his face against the floor. He had to hold on to something. He had to keep himself sane. He pushed himself to his knees and got himself over to the side of the room and leant against the wall. He knocked his head against the wall and listened to the sound it made and felt that small jar of pain, so he banged it harder and it jarred his skull and his teeth and sent ripples of pain through his head.

‘I am Illya Nikolayevich Kuryakin,’ he said out loud. ‘I am Illya Nikolayevich Kuryakin. I am not mad. I am Illya Nikolayevich Kuryakin. I am an agent for the U.N.C.L.E..’

His voice was weak and thin. It didn’t sound like his own.

‘Are you really?’ Napoleon asked. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I can’t see you,’ he wept. ‘Napoleon, I can’t see you. Napoleon, where are you?’

‘Illya, listen to the birds,’ Napoleon said. ‘Aren’t they beautiful? Can’t you hear the birds?’

‘I don’t want to hear the birds,’ he cried. ‘I’m so tired. Let me sleep. Please let me sleep...’

The birds were screeching and screaming, and he wanted to press his hands over his ears, but he couldn’t move his arms. And then the birds turned into that noise, and he was being sick, and then when he was conscious again there was the tray of food, but he couldn’t use his hands and he fought to eat the stuff from the bowl and spilled the drink over the floor.

‘Illya, you need to try to the left. To the left.’

He turned his head and tried listening to the left, and it didn’t make any difference. He pressed his face against the wall and cried out, ‘Please let me sleep. I don’t want to listen any more. Please...’

He was going mad. He was already mad. He hardly knew what he was, he was terrified, he was so scared of going mad… There was white, there was white, time stretched out so long and it was terrible it was terrible, and if he could have ended his life he would have done it. He lay for so long, drifting into sleep and being woken, vomiting, eating. He accepted after too long of holding on and pleading out loud for someone to remove the jacket that he would have to use the diaper, and he just let go, and in a way it was a relief, a blessed relief, to just lie there and let his bladder go. But after a while the thing grew so full of filth that his skin stung and itched and he strained at the arms of the jacket to try to get to it, but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t, and he dragged himself around the cell, trying to move the foetid mass, trying to itch, but it didn’t help.

Oh, he was so tired. How long had it been? He had no idea how long it had been, and he was starting to not believe in any reality before this one. He lay and stared and he saw the ceiling turn black and press down on him, pressing him into a tomb, and he screamed in terror. The entire world, his entire world, was convolving, twisting, images and sounds flooding in on him. He couldn’t tell what was real any more.

He drifted into sleep, and then the buzzer sounded.

 

((O))

 

He decided not to eat. They could hold him here, but if he didn’t eat he would die, and then they wouldn’t have him any more. They wouldn’t. He would be gone, beyond their control. He would own himself again.

He stepped over to the thin lines of the door and pressed his forehead against the rubbery white surface and he said very clearly, ‘I will not eat.’

The bowl and the cup were on the tray on the floor, but he would not eat. He wouldn’t. He leant against the door and said, ‘I won’t eat, I won’t eat, I won’t eat. You can’t make me sick and I won’t eat.’

‘Illya, will that really help?’

Illya closed his eyes and rolled his head from side to side and groaned.

‘Oh, Napoleon,’ he said. ‘Napoleon, don’t you understand?’

He sank down to his knees with his forehead still against the door. Oh, he was hungry. He was. The taste of vomit was still sour in his mouth, and he hated that food but he wanted it too, because it was the only way to get rid of the taste of the vomit, and he was hungry. He was always hungry.

He ran his tongue slowly over his teeth, trying to lick away that sharp, ugly taste, but it was all through his mouth, all over his tongue, the insides of his cheeks. There was an ulcer on his tongue and it hurt. It hurt whenever the stomach acid flooded past it.

‘I won’t eat,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No. Not until you take this thing off me – ’ And he tried to shake his arms furiously in their strapped sleeves. ‘Not until you let me be clean,’ he said, because the diaper was thick and heavy on him, filled with what must be days of waste. ‘Let me sleep,’ he sobbed.

‘Illya, Illya,’ Napoleon sang in his most enticing voice. Napoleon used that voice when he wanted Illya to do something.

Illya slipped down onto the floor and lay on his side, staring at the blank wall. Napoleon wasn’t here. He knew he wasn’t here, no matter how much he needed him to be here. He clenched and unclenched his hands over and over. He hadn’t seen his hands in too long. He wanted to see them. He wondered if they were really there, if his hands were really there. Maybe they were just bones, just bones. He was turning to a skeleton, joint by joint, and they covered him so he couldn’t see it and panic.

Oh god. His heart was beating so fast. He could see them now, the skeleton men, marching through the walls. They were coming for him, coming, pressing through the walls, and he could feel their bony hands and hear the scraping creak of their joints, and there was man after man, made of bone, coming for him, and he screamed and screamed and screamed and –

He was staring into open air, into white. Nothing. There was nothing. The birds flew somewhere invisible above him, just the flutter of wings and sometimes a liquid note and sometimes the harsh screech, and Napoleon said, ‘The birds will save you, Illya. Just stay to the left. Don’t let go of anything.’

‘Like traffic in England!’ he said, suddenly enlightened. ‘Stay left. Look right. Stay left. Look right.’

It all suddenly made sense. Stay left. Always look right when crossing the road. Always. Be aware of oncoming vehicles. Never stop on double yellow lines. There were jackdaws on the road, jackdaws and starlings. There was a blackbird that would perch in the bushes outside the window and sing and sing. Bright eyes, yellow beak. Blackbirds. They were a type of thrush. And he had to stay left, because there were birds on the road. Stay left, look right when crossing.

One, two, three, four, five blackbirds lined up in front of his cup and bowl, singing. There they were. He remembered a song a little girl used to sing. Who had it been? The daughter of one of the professors, he was sure. _Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was open the birds began to sing. Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the –_ But no. She was a queen, wasn’t she? To set before the queen. _They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace. Christopher Robin went down with Alice..._ She used to chant that, didn’t she? Trotting around Dr Wilcocks’ study with a doll under her arm, stamping her feet. He couldn’t remember her name. The queen was Elizabeth, but what about the little girl? Jane, she should have been. She should have been called Jane.

‘Go away, Jane,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t see this.’

He was filthy, filthy and mad. It was no place for a little girl. He rolled over, away from the sight of the bowl and cup. Stay left, look right. Stay left, look right. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t touch their food.

 

((O))

 

Linaeker stripped the subject naked and cleaned him and laid him on the table. Dr Malta checked the dosage in his syringe then inserted the needle swiftly into his arm. It was just enough to make sure he stayed asleep for the entire process. One moment of consciousness outside of the room and the whole project would be ruined.

He stood and looked at the subject for a while. It was rather fascinating to just look at him. When he had come in he had been strong of limb, reasonably well muscled, fit looking. Since his isolation he had dropped weight and muscle. He was paler, and his hair had darkened a little now it was no longer exposed to the sun. His lips looked a little thinner. His face was skull like because the dark hollows around his eyes were so deep.

He examined him carefully. It was important that he did not become ill, and he was exposed to the outside world every time he was hauled out of his containment area. He checked the pulse and respiration, listened to the chest, lifted the eyelids to look into the eyes. The eyes were bloodshot but the pupils were even. He looked in the ears and saw no build up of wax. The nose was clear. He opened the mouth. The throat looked a little sore, as expected from the frequent vomiting, and the teeth were suffering, but no matter. He was disturbed by the sight of a few ulcers in the mouth. Perhaps they should adjust the nutrition balance of his food.

He noted that down, then touched the slack penis, rolling back the foreskin, checking for discharge from the slitted opening of the urethra. The skin was a bit red. There was no discharge, but the penis smelt unwashed. Unsurprising, he supposed. It was impossible to find good staff who would take care of his subjects.

He checked the testicles. Each one a slightly different size, one sitting a little higher than the other. The delicate skin of the scrotum looked sore, but all in all, the subject was surprisingly healthy.

He rolled the subject over onto his side, smiling a little at the limp compliance of the unconscious body. He was so pliable like this. The skin felt chilled, but soft.

He took the thermometer and slipped it into the man’s rectum, but he frowned a little at the redness on the skin around that area and spreading across the buttocks just as it had disfigured his front.

‘You have been changing the diaper regularly?’ he asked Linaeker, looking up.

Linaeker scratched his cheek, then said, ‘Oh, of course, Doctor. He just seems sensitive, that’s all. Fair skin, you know.’

‘Hmm,’ the doctor said. He tapped his fingers impatiently on the subject’s hip, waiting for the mercury to rise. Then he took it out and checked it. Ninety seven degrees. He tutted. The subject was a little cold; but then perhaps that was a result of his depressed physical state.

‘All right, let’s get him fed,’ he said, dropping the thermometer into a metal bowl to be sterilised later.

He clicked his fingers and another man, he didn’t know his name, trundled over the trolley of feeding equipment. He didn’t bother with the names of most of these men. As long as they looked after the subject as ordered, he didn’t care what they were called.

‘All right, give me that tube,’ he murmured.

Linaeker looked vaguely discomfited as he passed over the slim rubber tube, but Dr Malta ignored his scruples. His views really didn’t matter. He bent over the subject and passed the tube with great care up into his nose and down to the stomach. He didn’t want to damage him, or leave him with pain. The subject was supposed to be insulated from all strong sensations, although some of the sensations he would experience soon were unavoidable. He had to be taught that he could not refuse food.

He attached the bag of liquid food, and started to feed it directly into the stomach.

‘Now, this will cause diarrhoea,’ he cautioned Linaeker, ‘so you will have to be extra vigilant about the diaper. Do you understand?’

‘Oh, of course, sir,’ Linaeker said quickly, but he looked disgruntled. ‘Do you – er – do you expect to have to tube feed him for long?’

Dr Malta idly shook his head, watching the white concoction as it travelled slowly through the tube.

‘I don’t expect to have to repeat this,’ he said. ‘There’s an additive in here that will make him feel rather unwell. He should understand that his options are quite limited.’

 

((O))

 

Illya lay curled around himself, gaping in discomfort. He wished he could press his hand against his stomach. He felt so bad. The cramps were so strong. He had woken with such a heavy feeling in his stomach, and he had known what had happened. They had taken him while he was unconscious, and they had fed him. He didn’t know what they had fed him, but the taste in the gas that burped up through his mouth was not like the white stuff. This stuff was foul, it was utterly foul. There was a foul taste in his mouth.

He lay and moaned. It felt as if someone were twisting a knife in his guts, and he felt so full, so horribly full. Nausea was pushing at the back of his throat, and it was not being caused by that noise this time. It was coming directly from that food, that awful food.

And then he couldn’t hold it. He vomited, and as he vomited his bowels let go, and something thin and hot and acid was streaming into the diaper. He made an incoherent noise at the pain, but he was vomiting still and he couldn’t form words. The stuff was coming through the diaper, through the white cloth of his trousers, and his skin burned. He felt so ill, so terribly ill, and he knew this was his punishment for refusing to eat.

He lay there for a long time, the room filled with the awful scent of his body’s rebellion, his stomach and guts cramping and churning. He couldn’t stand it. The pain was terrible, the misery was vile. He sobbed at the pain and the helplessness. When the next tray of food came, he ate it.

 

((O))

 

‘Illya, Illya, Illya.’

Napoleon was almost singing. Illya lay and listened to his voice and he wondered if he could sing too. He opened his mouth and the sound was like a dying crow. Why was Napoleon allowed a beautiful voice and singing birds when he was allowed nothing? He watched the wings of the birds stretching out wide above him, the entire ceiling covered by black wings, their feathers tattered and smelling of old blood. The songs those birds sang were cracked and ugly and they scared him. He closed his eyes tightly and rolled his head and tried to sing a song. He tried. There was something wrong with him and he couldn’t remember any words. Someone had stolen all the words from him, and the wings made a black and dirty canopy above him.

And then they were gone and the ceiling was white again, all white, so bright. He was so tired. Why couldn’t he sleep? Oh, he wanted to sleep...

He lay staring at the ceiling, forcing his eyes to stay open. He opened his mouth and swallowed the air. His eyes stung. Was the air a little stale? Was it warmer than usual? He was suddenly overtaken with horror. The air was thinning, it was running out, he was going to suffocate. Oh god, oh god, he was going to run out of air. He lurched to his knees and then to his feet and staggered to the door and pressed his face against the almost invisible cracks and screamed, ‘Help me! Please, help me! I’m suffocating! Let me out, let me out!’

He gasped in air, his chest heaving. He struggled to get his arms out of that awful constricting top, but he was bound too tightly. He slammed his head against the door and sobbed and sobbed, his breath coming so fast, his lungs expelling his air almost before it had entered. His head started to whirl and he screamed and slammed his shoulders against the wall, left and right, left and right. And then his breaths were so shallow and his mind was so dizzy, and it overcame him and he fainted.

He lay there, moaning, awareness coming back, and with it, a strange clarity. There was still air. The air had never been running out. He had hyperventilated. He had made himself collapse with his own hysteria. He lay there, sick and dizzy, and he started to laugh, and his laugh became a shriek that was so out of his own control that it terrified him.

 

((O))

 

It was a hell of a place. Underground, under some vast, sprawling industrial complex. ‘Shall we use tranq-darts?’ McKellan asked, and Napoleon shook his head. There was a hardness in him now. Illya had been gone for two months, and it was too long. No, they didn’t deserve tranquilliser darts. They deserved all they got, and whatever hell was waiting for them.

He had a team of fifteen. He had a helicopter standing by. They were going in guns blazing, and no one mattered any more, not McKellan, not the rest of the team. Oh, they mattered as agents, their safety mattered, but the goal was getting Illya out alive.

He shot two hostiles before they even knew he was there, and then the other U.N.C.L.E. men were fanning out, racing through the place, taking people out, securing the ones who surrendered before they were shot. Napoleon just made for the basement, because he knew that was where Illya was. The tip-off had been good, it had been solid, and that was where Illya would be.

And he found him. He found that odd, wide underground room, men lounging about in easy chairs, some of them eating, bottles of beer on the table and a card game in progress. And he shot them. He didn’t care. He shot them, and then he caught sight of the television monitor, and his heart almost stopped. There was Illya, seen from above in a perfectly white space, lying on the floor in a foetal position with his arms strapped around his body by a straitjacket. His eyes were open but glazed, and he was talking. Napoleon could hear every word through the television speakers. He was rambling, going from English to Russian and back again in a voice that was weak and wavering and incoherent.

He snapped his gaze to the left and saw where he must be. It was a cube, an odd room that was free-standing in the middle of this big basement room, the outside walls covered in some kind of thick insulation, and a door in one side with a big lock on it. He plastered explosive on the lock and blew it, and wrenched the door open, and Illya was there in front of him, there in that perfectly white room, staring and crying out wordlessly in a kind of animal fear, scampering himself backwards across the floor.

‘Oh my god, Illya,’ he murmured. He stepped forward to him, and just had the presence of mind to throw down a smoke bomb behind him to obscure the view of anyone coming in on him before he stepped into that weird white cell.

 

((O))

 

After a long, long time Illya saw something momentous, unprecedented. There was a rectangle in the room, a dark rectangle, and sounds from outside of himself, and he cried out and threw himself backwards. There was a heavy, cool mass in the diaper that had been there for so long, and his eyes were so tired, and there was something in his nostrils. Oh god, there was the smell of blood everywhere, blood and cordite, and he closed his eyes tightly against that brash rectangle of darkness in the room. There was something touching him, and he cried out formlessly. There was a snapping bang so loud it made him flail, and he stared at a dark shape in the rectangle where the door had been.

‘Napoleon?’

Face, arms, legs. It was hard to put those pieces together. This was Napoleon, this was a man.

‘That’s it, buddy. You’re okay. Just come with me. Come with me.’

He moved stiffly, stumbling, his knees trying to let him down. ‘Napoleon?’

‘Yeah, Illya. Come on, now. We have to get out of here.’

He stared at the dark rectangle, and fear consumed him. He couldn’t. He couldn’t go out there.

‘No, it’s my room, it’s my room, this is my room,’ he babbled. He felt as if he were falling apart, and the only stability was in his white room. He couldn’t move towards that door. He couldn’t do it. He didn’t even know if this were real. Maybe none of it was real. Maybe it was all inside his mind, like everything else.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said. ‘Illya, come on. We _have_ to go.’

His mouth was open and mute. His arms were still held against his body. He didn’t know where to look. There was so much outside the room that he couldn’t see any of it properly. He could see men, dead men, and all the colour and shapes that were around him were too much, they were far too much. He wanted to scream or cry and he didn’t know which.

‘Napoleon?’ he asked again.

And then he wasn’t standing any more, he was slung over Napoleon’s shoulder, weeping. Napoleon was running, and his sobs came out in distorted huffs as his stomach was pressed and jerked with the motion. His head was spinning. He couldn’t do this. It was too much. He couldn’t take it in.

‘Napoleon?’

He was being laid down and Napoleon was kneeling over him and cutting the straps that held his arms to his body, and there was a smell of oil and fuel and a sound so loud it made him cry out. He tried to press his hands over his ears, his hands that were still covered by the ends of those sewn-shut sleeves, and Napoleon shouted, ‘Can I get some headphones over here? This man’s been in severe sensory deprivation.’

And then Napoleon was putting soft padded earphones over his ears, and that helped, it helped a bit, and he lay there shaking, his eyes squeezed closed.

‘You’re in a helicopter,’ Napoleon said. ‘You’re all right. We’re getting you out of here.’

He blinked his eyes open and stared. If he looked just at Napoleon it wasn’t so bad. He just looked at Napoleon’s eyes. Just those two eyes. Brown. He looked into the brownness.

‘How long?’ he asked.

‘How long did they have you? A little over two months. It was a pretty intense sensory deprivation, huh?’

‘Sensory, sleep...’ And he began to sob again. ‘I’m so tired. Please let me sleep.’

‘You can sleep, Illya,’ Napoleon said gently. ‘There’s no one stopping you from sleeping now.’

Illya flailed on the stretcher he was lying on, looking for the birds, looking for the noise that made him sick, looking for the buzzer that would wake him up. There was so much sound here, so many colours, everything jarring in on his nerves to the point of causing him physical pain, panic, horror. There was terror, terror, he was spinning and crying out. All those things, they were coming in, falling in on him, curling in on him. They were going to kill him. And then there was a sting at his arm and Napoleon’s hand stroking the hair from his forehead, and then everything melted away...

 

((O))

 

It was hard to see this as really being Illya. This Illya was so different, so altered. He had dropped so much weight and his face was so changed by fear, and there was nothing of Illya in his eyes, not really. His eyes were just blue, and the intelligence was gone. Fears raced through Napoleon’s mind, one after another. What if he had been permanently damaged? What if they’d given him drugs that had damaged his brain?

He had to catch his breath and steady himself. There was no point in thinking about those things now. He had to focus on Illya. He was like a wild animal and it was obvious that the sounds and scents and sights of his surroundings were terrifying him. He yelled out for headphones, knowing he had to cut down on some of the sensory input, and someone passed over a pair of pilot’s headphones, the jack not connected to anything. He slipped them onto Illya’s ears and pressed them there. Illya closed his eyes so tightly his whole face was screwed up, and he was shaking, shaking so hard.

‘You’re in a helicopter,’ Napoleon told him, clear so he could hear it through the headphones. ‘You’re all right. We’re getting you out of here.’

Illya opened his eyes, but there was still that awful vacancy in them. But then they caught and held on Napoleon’s face, and there was something there, something of the Illya that he knew, and his heart flopped. _Thank god_ , he thought. It was just a look, nothing more, but Illya was in there and staring straight into his eyes like a man hanging from a cliff would stare at the hand that stopped him falling.

‘How long?’ Illya asked, and Napoleon’s heart flopped again. It wasn’t much of a sentence, but it was coherent and to the point. He wasn’t screaming about his room or just repeating Napoleon’s name.

‘How long did they have you?’ he asked. God, it had been so long. It had felt so long to him. To Illya it must have been a lifetime. ‘A little over two months. It was a pretty intense sensory deprivation, huh?’

‘Sensory, sleep...’ And he broke down in tears, his face losing all of its resolve. It was pitiful to see. ‘I’m so tired. Please let me sleep.’

‘You can sleep, Illya,’ Napoleon said. His heart was torn open by this naked, desperate sobbing. ‘Illya, listen. There’s no one stopping you from sleeping now.’

And someone else jumped into the helicopter and it lurched as it lifted off, and the radio started chattering, and suddenly Illya was flailing, struggling, crying out, and Napoleon held him to the stretcher and snapped, ‘Sedative! I need a sedative! Something to put him right under!’

Someone handed him a syringe and he stuck it into Illya’s arm straight through the sleeve, and mercifully he slumped into stillness.

Napoleon just sat there looking at him, oblivious to the sounds around him, the drumming of the helicopter’s rotors, the chatter of the radio. He didn’t even know who else was in here besides the pilot, but he spared him a glance and saw Geoff McKellan, and he experienced a moment of deep thanks for his help today. But then he looked back to Illya. He looked so small and fragile, his jaw made more square and his cheekbones more sharp by his thinness. His face looked terrible, skull like. He saw the pale pearly remains of scratches on his face, and knew they had been self-inflicted by the way they ran parallel down his cheeks. There was a foetid scent rising from him. He had been able to feel the bulk of some kind of diaper on him as he carried him, and from the smell of it it hadn’t been changed recently.

He got hold of a pair of scissors from the medical kit and carefully cut the ends of those sewn-shut sleeves, and finally he could see Illya’s hands. They were thin and delicate. The bones running from his wrists to the tips of his fingers made him think of a bird’s feet. His nails were too long. Everything spoke of a very calculated neglect.

‘How is he?’ Geoff asked, and Napoleon jumped. He had forgotten he was there.

‘He’s alive, anyway,’ Napoleon said.

And Geoff moved in beside him and put a thumb very gently on Illya’s eyelid to lift it and look into one eye, then the other. Then he put his fingertip carefully between his lips and opened his mouth, and wrinkled his nose a little because Illya’s breath smelt foul.

‘Hold the flashlight for me, will you?’ he asked, and Napoleon obeyed because he seemed to know what he was doing. He angled the light into Illya’s mouth.

‘Throat’s very sore,’ Geoff said, ‘and I think there’s signs of enamel wearing on his teeth. He’s been sick. I mean, he’s been made to vomit a lot. The stomach acid wears on your teeth.’

Napoleon stared at him. He had never really looked into Geoff’s file. He supposed he should have, but he just hadn’t. He wasn’t a doctor; he would have known if he were. But he obviously had a good stock of medical information in his head.

‘He’s been made to vomit, or he’s made himself vomit?’ he asked, thinking about those self-inflicted scratches on Illya’s face.

‘I think he’s been made to. It’s hard to make yourself throw up without sticking something down your throat, and I don’t know how long he’s been in that jacket, but there’s vomit down the front, see?’

He touched his finger lightly to a dried, flaking patch of whitish stuff, and Napoleon grimaced.

‘He’s in a diaper, too,’ he said.

‘We don’t have the facilities on board to clean him up,’ Geoff said rationally. ‘Best leave it on for now. If he’s been in it for a while he’ll be sore, he might have open wounds, and it’s best we don’t expose them until we’ve got something to clean him properly.’

He just sat and watched as Geoff lifted up the jacket a little to look at Illya’s thin abdomen. The man palpated his fingers across his flat stomach, and seemed satisfied.

‘You’re not a doctor?’ Napoleon asked then.

‘No,’ Geoff said, ‘but I’ve always had an interest. I’ve poked my nose in a lot.’

Napoleon smiled. ‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you were here.’

He turned back to Illya, keeping his eyes on him as the helicopter raced through the darkness, still half afraid of something happening to take him away. He had been terribly treated and was pale and so thin, and Napoleon wouldn’t be happy until he was in a hospital bed.

When the helicopter landed on the roof of U.N.C.L.E. HQ there was already a stretcher waiting, and Napoleon stayed right at Illya’s side as he was hustled inside.

‘I’ll start on the reports,’ Geoff said, patting his arm. ‘You stay with him. I think he’ll need an anchor.’

Why had Napoleon never appreciated this man? He should have appreciated him earlier. He could never fill Illya’s shoes, no one could, but as Geoffrey McKellan he was a very good agent, and tonight he appreciated him more than anything.

He hurried alongside Illya as he was taken into the elevator and went with him all the way down to the infirmary, where he was transferred to a table and the medics started to strip the white clothes from him. When they peeled off the diaper everyone in the room recoiled for a moment. He must have been left in it for days, and as they started to clean him up Napoleon stood at the side of the room just staring, wincing at how red and raw the skin underneath was. How could anyone treat a man like that? How could he be subject to such awful neglect?

‘Doctor, will he be all right?’ he asked as the doctor turned away to drop a handful of soiled cloths into a bucket.

‘Physically I think he’ll be fine,’ the man said, then he glanced at Illya and shrugged. ‘Mentally – after two months in solitary confinement undergoing sensory deprivation and horrendous neglect – I don’t know. I can’t possibly say. Dr Bainbridge will see him and make an assessment, I’m sure.’

‘We’ll need to know if he cracked,’ Napoleon said, hating himself for that harsh practicality, but it was true. They needed to know if Illya had told them anything.

‘Well, I heard over the communications system that the clean-up crew have secured reels and reels of film from the place,’ the doctor said. ‘Seems they recorded most of his captivity, probably for research purposes. That will help tell us a lot.’

Napoleon bit his lip. He hated the thought of that, and he hated the thought of someone watching film of Illya in such a vulnerable state.

‘I’ll watch it,’ he said after a moment. ‘I’ll watch it with the psychiatrist. I don’t want just anyone seeing those tapes. He’d hate that.’

The doctor shrugged. ‘Well, it’s not up to me, Mr Solo. I’d put in that request to Waverly if I were you, as soon as possible. But then come back here. We’ll keep him on strong sedation because of the sensory deprivation, but I want to let him wake up as soon as possible. Then we’ll know better what we’re dealing with. I want him to have your face be the first thing he sees.’

 

((O))

 

He was lying in a bed. His throat was sore and his stomach muscles hurt, but he had slept. Oh god, he had slept. He had been allowed to sleep. That was the most wonderful thing in the world. He had been allowed to sleep. He blinked his crusted eyes and looked around, and he saw he was in a hospital room, in U.N.C.L.E. medical. There was a drip in his arm and blankets pulled up under his chin, and there in the chair beside him, eyes closed and head lolling, was Napoleon.

He opened his mouth and tried to say something, but only a gargle of sound came out, not words. Napoleon jerked awake, blinked, and smiled.

‘Illya,’ he said, his voice very soft and quiet. ‘Feeling a little better?’

Illya smiled. ‘I think – ’ he started to say, but his throat was so dry that the words didn’t work.

‘A little water?’ Napoleon asked, and he poured some water into a glass and put a hand under Illya’s head and held the glass to his lips. Illya sipped at the cool, thin, clear liquid and almost recoiled at the sharp cold feeling of it. He hadn’t had water for – he didn’t know how long. How strange it was.

He swallowed and coughed a little, and tried again.

‘I think I might be insane,’ he said, and his voice sounded strange, dry and broken. The sounds and sights were crowding around him, pressing in on him, but there was a softness hanging over everything, making it not seem to matter as it should.

Napoleon reached out and patted his arm. ‘If you can say that, Illya, then you’re not insane. That’s the rule. Didn’t you know?’

Illya just lay and stared at him. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said.

‘Well, it is.’

‘Oh,’ he said, then he said, ‘I feel weird, Napoleon. What are they giving me?’

‘You’re on a pretty strong sedative because of the sensory deprivation they had you under. You started panicking on the helicopter.’

‘Oh,’ he said again. ‘I don’t really remember...’

‘That’s okay,’ Napoleon smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter. We’re just going to keep everything very calm and very quiet for you, and keep you on that sedative. You’ll probably need it for a while, until you adjust to the outside world again.’

‘Outside...’ Illya murmured.

He imagined outside, the blue sky, the feeling of wind, the sound of traffic and people, all their voices a bedlam in the city. He didn’t know if the idea horrified or attracted him. He remembered sitting there in that room pressing his hands into his own faeces just to give himself a sensation, and spreading that colour about the room, and he wondered if Napoleon was right about him not being insane. He lifted a hand to his face and looked at it. His nails had grown long again while he was in the straitjacket. His hand was perfectly clean.

But there had been a long time after that, hadn’t there? He had spent a long time not able to move his arms at all, not able to see his hands, feeling that awful diaper around him getting heavier and fecund with his waste and unable to do anything about it. He had spent a long time just lying on the floor and staring at the whiteness, unable to imagine a single thing that could mar the blankness hovering above him. Now when he looked up he saw lines on the ceiling that he could hardly comprehend, and a strip light fitting, and the sight of those things made him feel uneasy and slightly sick. Would he ever be able to look up into a sky with clouds?

‘Will I adjust?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Napoleon said firmly. ‘With a little time and a little help, you’ll be fine.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Illya repeated slowly. If Napoleon said so, it must be true.

He lay there sleepily, just letting the feelings and sounds and smells drift about him. It was so strange after all that time in that room. He had been in a desperate, horrible limbo for so long. There was a little feeling of panic that kept trying to rise inside him, but the sedative sat on top of it and kept it down. He drifted away and then woke up again, and Napoleon was still there, sitting by him, just watching him.

‘Back again?’ Napoleon asked.

‘Mmmm,’ Illya said sleepily, looking about himself. He was in a private room and the lights were dim and it seemed very much stripped down from the rooms he knew in U.N.C.L.E. medical. Someone had taped paper over the window in the door to keep out the brash light from the corridor. Calm and quiet, as Napoleon had said. He looked idly at the drip line in the back of his hand and thought about picking at it to make a sensation, and then he clenched his free hand because he knew he shouldn’t do that. It was strange to be able to see his hands.

‘You okay, Illya?’ Napoleon asked.

‘Okay,’ Illya said.

‘Still feeling a bit odd, huh?’ he said sympathetically.

Illya squinted. ‘A bit. Quite. Yes. I suppose it will take time, like you said.’

‘You’re doing better than anyone expected. Good agents have been left gibbering wrecks after that long in sensory deprivation.’

‘Gibbering,’ Illya murmured. That was the word, wasn’t it? Gibbering, like a monkey. He had gibbered, though. He had. But then, he had had Napoleon to talk to. Had he gibbered to Napoleon or had he spoken to him rationally? Was anything rational in that place?

‘I wasn’t entirely alone,’ Illya said, turning his head to look at Napoleon again. It was such an incredible thing to see, another human face. All those lines, that colour, the shocking dark of Napoleon’s hair, the red of his lips. He drifted into seeing it as a kind of Picasso face, all disjointed elements jumbled together, and then it resolved again into a whole. When that happened he felt as if he were falling. He felt as if he were very high and plummeting into an empty space, and everything spun and he wanted to catch hold of something, but there was nothing there.

‘Huh?’ Napoleon asked.

‘What?’ Illya asked vaguely, focussing on Napoleon again, seeing him as a whole again.

‘You said you weren’t alone.’

‘Oh.’ Illya smiled. ‘You were there with me, sometimes. You kept trying to make me listen to birds. There weren’t any birds, but I could hear them. Sometimes I could see them.’

‘Napoleon Solo, birdwatcher,’ Napoleon murmured. ‘I don’t think that was me.’

‘No, I don’t think it was. But it was good to not be alone,’ Illya said, ‘even if you weren’t real, even if you were very annoying.’

Napoleon grimaced. ‘I can’t even work out if that’s a compliment or not.’

Illya looked at him. ‘I don’t know either,’ he said. ‘But it’s good to not be alone.’

He felt very sleepy still, very tired. But there was something wonderful about sleep after so long of being prevented from sleeping. He felt as if perhaps he would become sane again. His body felt odd after being confined for so long, and he was sore from being left in that diaper. The bed felt as if it were rocking beneath him and his ears rang a little at every noise, and his throat hurt. But after two months without hearing a real human voice, without seeing a human face, with almost no sleep and having suffered almost unimaginable deprivation, it was so good to not be alone.

 

((O))

 

He didn’t like the idea of leaving Illya, but when the sedative kicked in again and sent him to sleep Napoleon took the opportunity to get his own much needed sleep. It was almost three in the morning, and he was exhausted. He dropped himself into the narrow bed in one of the little agents’ rooms at headquarters and fell into a dead sleep almost immediately.

He came back to the infirmary in the morning feeling refreshed, at least, and started towards the room where Illya had been last night.

‘Oh, Mr Solo, he’s in one of the rooms in the Psych Department,’ a nurse called as he passed.

Napoleon stopped, swivelling on the balls of his feet to face the woman.

‘Psych?’ he echoed.

‘It’s quieter for him,’ she explained. ‘He’s still on a drip, but he doesn’t need all the equipment around him. He needs a calm, quiet space. Besides, he’s going to need a lot of help from Psychiatry to get over this.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Napoleon nodded. ‘Thanks for telling me.’

And he turned in the opposite direction towards the Psych ward, which was typically quiet and calm, with carpeted floors. He walked down to the couple of patient rooms there and decided that the one with the paper taped over the window in the door must be Illya’s. He tapped lightly on the door, mindful of not making a startling noise, then cracked it open when there was no reply.

Illya was sitting on the bed in light blue pyjamas, his arms folded up in front of his body, rocking and gently picking at the cannula in his hand. Blood ran in a trickle down the back of his wrist and was soaking into his pyjama sleeve.

Napoleon was poised to call out in shock but he stopped himself just in time. Such a sudden noise would probably be too much for Illya in this state.

‘Illya,’ he said softly. ‘What are you doing?’

Illya’s head jerked up. He looked bewildered, his eyes unfocussed. ‘Napoleon?’

‘Yeah,’ Napoleon said, coming across the room to him and gently taking hold of his hands.

Illya just stared at him, his fingers still twitching a little.

‘Are you real?’ he asked with a terrible, naked vulnerability that made a lump swell in Napoleon’s throat. ‘Because I woke up and everything had changed and you weren’t here...’

‘I’m real,’ Napoleon promised him, keeping hold of his hands.

Illya’s eyes moved up and down Napoleon’s body, then he twisted to the left and said, ‘I can’t hear the birds, Napoleon. I tried to the left and I can’t find the birds...’

‘There aren’t any birds in here, Illya,’ Napoleon said, his worry blooming.

‘But you always told me to listen to the birds, and I heard the birds, and now I can’t find them. Napoleon!’ His voice broke, and he started to sob. ‘Where’s my room? I don’t like this room. I want to go back to my room...’

A faecal scent rose as he moved in his agitation, and Napoleon realised with horror that he had soiled himself as if he were still wearing that diaper.

‘Illya,’ he said softly. How had this happened? He had seemed all right last night. Not well, but all right. ‘Illya, it’s okay. You’re safe here.’

He put a hand on Illya’s shoulder, slightly afraid of overwhelming him with more touch, but Illya took hold of his jacket with both hands, and so Napoleon hugged him gently while Illya rocked against him, his shoulders shuddering. He held him until he had calmed down. The smell of faeces was so strong it revolted him.

‘Illya, I need to call in a nurse to clean you up,’ he said.

Illya stared at the door, his eyes widening. ‘I can’t,’ he began. ‘I – ’

‘Illya, look, I need to get a nurse,’ Napoleon insisted. ‘I can’t leave you like this.’

And he started to get up, but Illya keened, ‘No no no no no,’ and Napoleon turned back and put his hands on his arms very softly.

‘Illya, it’s all right. You’re safe. You’re home. Everyone here is here to help you.’

But Illya was shaking, and Napoleon sighed. He was afraid of sending him even further over the edge by leaving him.

‘Will you let me help you?’ he asked.

Illya just stared at him, so Napoleon took him by the hand and very gently encouraged him to stand up, and said, ‘Illya, can you bring along that drip stand?’

Illya looked at him dubiously but to Napoleon’s enormous relief he reached out and took hold of the stand, and when Napoleon made him walk he brought the stand trundling along, wincing his head sideways at the sound it made.

‘Are you real? Is it real?’ Illya asked.

‘It’s all real,’ Napoleon promised him.

‘No birds?’

Napoleon smiled. ‘No birds. I don’t want you to listen for any birds.’

He wondered briefly if the birds were Thrushies. Perhaps Illya had hallucinated a kind of warning.

‘Come on in here,’ he told Illya, taking him into the little en suite bathroom, thanking god that the Psych rooms had such a thing. ‘Now, will you let me help you?’ he asked.

Illya looked at him blankly. Napoleon put his hands to the waistband of Illya’s pyjama trousers.

‘Illya, will you let me clean you up?’

Wordlessly, Illya nodded, so he peeled down the trousers and threw them into the shower, then took a washcloth and carefully, diligently, cleaned Illya with warm soapy water. He had to remove the soiled dressings and he bit his lip at the sight of the raw, weeping skin. He carefully cleaned the wounds while Illya held on to the edge of the basin and gasped with pain. This was so terrible. He would do it for his friend, but he hated to have to do it. He hated that Illya needed it to be done.

He patted him dry gently with the towel, then tried to get Illya to meet his gaze.

‘Okay?’ he asked. ‘That’s better, yes?’

Illya’s eyes became riveted onto his, and he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Napoleon. I – ’

He didn’t seem to know what he wanted to say. He looked down at himself as if becoming aware that he was standing there in nothing but a pyjama top, but he didn’t seem bothered by it.

‘Thank you,’ he said again.

‘Any time,’ Napoleon smiled, although he sincerely hoped he wouldn’t have to do that again.

He led Illya back into the room just in his top, and checked that the bed was clean. Illya had been sitting on top of the covers, so he pulled the slightly stained top sheet off and threw it with the pyjama bottoms in the shower, and then said to Illya, ‘It’s all right. You can get back in bed now. But you tell me if you need the bathroom, won’t you?’

Illya climbed onto the bed and sat there, and Napoleon drew the remaining blanket over his naked lower half.

‘Does that feel better?’ he asked, and Illya nodded.

‘Now, I’ll get a nurse to see to your hand – ’

Illya’s eyes widened and he reached out towards his partner. ‘Don’t go, Napoleon. You’re real, aren’t you?’

Napoleon sighed. ‘I’m real, Illya,’ he promised again. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on Illya’s arm. ‘When you imagined me in that room, did I ever touch you?’

Illya stared at Napoleon’s hand. ‘I couldn’t see you. I couldn’t even see you. It was – ’

Illya looked about as if searching for something, then reached up and touched the lapel of Napoleon’s suit, rubbing it between his fingers.

‘Oh god, Napoleon,’ he said, the words catching in his throat. ‘I am mad...’

‘No,’ Napoleon insisted, although he wasn’t so sure now. ‘You’re not well. You’re going to get better.’

He glanced at the emergency cord, wondering if he dare pull it to summon a nurse. He was afraid an alarm would go off or lights would flash, and he didn’t want anything to startle his partner. But as he was looking at it the door opened and a nurse bustled in with a tray in her hands.

‘Mr Kuryakin – Oh, Mr Solo!’ she said softly.

‘How long has he been left alone in here?’ Napoleon asked darkly, letting his discomfort and worry manifest as anger, although he kept his voice low.

She looked startled and guilty. ‘I didn’t expect him to be awake yet,’ she said. ‘I checked in an hour ago. What’s wrong?’

‘Look at his hand,’ Napoleon said, lifting Illya’s bloody hand. ‘And he – ’ He squirmed a little. He didn’t like talking about this right in front of Illya. ‘He soiled himself,’ he said awkwardly.

The nurse’s face changed. ‘Oh, gosh, Mr Kuryakin, I’m sorry,’ she said sincerely, hurrying over to him. ‘We should get you – ’

‘I’ve cleaned him up,’ Napoleon explained rather tersely, and she seemed relieved.

The nurse turned to look at his hand then, tutting at the state of the cannula. ‘You know, this needs to be left alone, Mr Kuryakin,’ she said patiently, carefully removing the needle then pressing a little cotton wool pad over the wound. ‘Mr Solo, would you watch him a moment?’

Napoleon nodded, and he took hold of Illya’s hand, keeping the cotton wool pressed onto the wound. The nurse quickly left the room, returning a few minutes later with a stainless steel dish of things and a new pair of pyjamas over her arm.

‘All right,’ she said gently. ‘I’m going to have to put the drip line in the other hand. All right, Mr Kuryakin?’

Illya nodded slowly, then looked at Napoleon and said with a slight smile, ‘I know she’s real. There weren’t nurses in my room.’

Napoleon returned the smile, but he felt so shaken and so deeply worried. This wasn’t Illya. It wasn’t Illya at all.

Illya lay still while she dressed his damaged hand and inserted the new cannula in the other, bandaging it thoroughly so he couldn’t pick at it. His eyes watched every movement that she made. She put the pyjamas down on a small table and said, ‘Maybe Mr Solo can help you with these in a little while? Would you rather that?’

Illya nodded mutely. Napoleon got the sense that he had trouble dealing with more than one person at once.

‘Now, I need to take a look at your sores,’ the nurse continued.

‘He’ll – uh – need new dressings,’ Napoleon said. ‘I had to take them off. They were covered in – well – ’

‘I understand,’ the nurse smiled. ‘Mr Kuryakin, if you can lie on your side for a moment?’

Illya turned obediently, but he held out a hand towards Napoleon, and Napoleon held it while the nurse carefully applied cream and dressed the wounds.

‘Now, I have breakfast and your medication for you,’ the nurse said, coming back from the bathroom after washing her hands. ‘That’s why I came in in the first place.’

She picked up the tray she had originally brought into the room and put it on the food table which she trundled over the bed. Illya stared at the items on the tray.

‘A cup of tea, and oatmeal,’ she said with a smile. ‘Not the most exciting meal, but we need to keep it simple for now.’

Napoleon noticed the little cup of pills at the side. ‘And those?’

‘Sedative, anti-psychotic, anti-emetic,’ she shrugged. ‘We gave him a little to eat in the night because he’s not really on any day-night schedule at all, and he brought it back up.’

 _Oh, Illya..._ Napoleon felt deeply guilty for leaving him at all, even though he had desperately needed sleep.

‘He’s only had very, very plain food for two months,’ she told him. ‘There’s an adjustment period.’

Napoleon realised that through all of this Illya was just sitting and staring, as if all the conversation bewildered him. He had been isolated from hearing conversation for so long. No wonder he had baulked at the idea of Napoleon calling the nurse in.

She turned back to Illya and said, ‘Can you take your pills first, Mr Kuryakin? All at once or one at a time?’

Wordlessly he picked up the little cup and tipped the pills into his mouth, then picked up the water glass and swallowed them.

‘There. That’s good,’ the nurse smiled. ‘Would you like me to leave you alone with Mr Solo while you eat?’

‘Yes, please,’ Illya said, and those few words startled Napoleon.

The nurse nodded and smiled, and went to fetch the dirty linen from the bathroom before going softly out of the room.

‘All right, Illya?’ Napoleon asked him anxiously.

Illya nodded, but he looked pale and distracted. ‘I think so. Sometimes I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know where I am.’

‘Pills kicking in?’

He picked at the blanket with his bandaged left hand. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know yet...’

He took the spoon from the tray and considered it for a moment, before dabbing at the oatmeal.

‘It isn’t white,’ he said.

Napoleon felt worried. ‘Uh – no, it’s not.’

‘They gave me this slop to eat,’ he said, stirring the oatmeal around. ‘It was all white, no taste.’

Napoleon shuddered. ‘Well, oatmeal’s got to be an improvement.’

Illya took a tentative mouthful, and grimaced.

‘Too strong, huh?’

He nodded, and swallowed with visible effort. ‘I have to,’ he said as if to himself. ‘I have to.’

‘Don’t force yourself,’ Napoleon told him. He sat down in the visitor’s chair and smiled at Illya. ‘Just take it slowly, why don’t you? There’s no time limit.’

‘No, I know,’ Illya murmured, looking into the bowl. Then he said almost tearfully, ‘I hated that white stuff. I longed for something real, and now I can’t eat it...’

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said. ‘Before, when I came in, and you were picking at your hand, and – ’

Illya swallowed another mouthful and looked up mournfully. ‘I think I come and go,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I know exactly where I am. Sometimes – ’ He shuddered. ‘It – it helps to have you here.’

‘I can’t be here all the time, Illya,’ Napoleon said reluctantly.

‘No, I know,’ he said. ‘I know. I – I need to try. But when I – I don’t know. I float away, Napoleon. Nothing seems real. And then I don’t know what to do or where to turn. I hear things and I see things, and it’s so terrifying...’

Napoleon put a hand on his arm. ‘Time, Illya,’ he said. ‘Give it some time for the drugs to work, and the counselling to work. Give it time, okay? I’ll be here as much as I can. I can bring work down here, I’m sure. But you know that Mr Waverly might send me out into the field at any time.’

‘You don’t have a partner,’ Illya said anxiously.

‘I’m working with Geoff McKellen,’ Napoleon said, and immediately regretted it. Illya looked stricken.

‘A new partner?’

‘A temporary partner,’ Napoleon assured him. ‘Someone to be with me while you can’t be.’

‘Temporary...’

Illya took another spoonful of the oatmeal and swallowed.

‘Hey, why don’t you try the tea?’ Napoleon suggested, pushing the cup towards him. It looked horrible to him, too weak and too milky and by the feeling of the cup it was only lukewarm, but perhaps it would be good for Illya.

Illya picked up the cup hesitantly and took a sip.

‘All right?’ Napoleon asked, and Illya nodded.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, and he poured some of the drink into his bowl and stirred it around. Napoleon wrinkled his nose, but when Illya took another spoonful of the oatmeal he seemed happier.

 

((O))

 

Napoleon hated to leave Illya alone in the state he was in, but there was so much to do. He spent hours that first day writing up his report of the raid on the facility where Illya had been found, justifying the force used and the lives lost and the money spent. Then he went to the photography lab where there were boxes full of film reel and a hand-picked team were sorting through them. He caught a glimpse of one of the reels running without sound, a nightmare vision of Illya before his arms had been bound in that straitjacket, wearing an all-in-one white jumpsuit, pacing the room and knocking his head against the wall and talking to himself and drifting into sleep and being woken. It was terrible to see, and he felt sick at the thought of having to sit through those reels, but he would have to. He had lost all illusions that he could do the job alone, but he would have to sit through the worst. He owed that much to Illya.

When he visited the Russian the next day he hoped against hope for improvement, but if anything Illya seemed worse.

‘A degree of shock over his release,’ the nurse whispered to him as they watched him through a crack in the door. ‘As horrific as that place was, it was a kind of security for him. He’s had that ripped away. This place is just too full of stimuli.’

‘And it’s okay for me to go in there and – er – stimulate him?’ Napoleon asked anxiously.

And she nodded. ‘He needs it. He needs you. A lot of the time he’s locked away in his own head, but when he’s there with us he asks for you.’

That made Napoleon’s heart lurch a little both with pleasure and pity. He was glad that Illya wanted him. He was sorry that Illya needed him.

So he walked in through the door to where Illya was sitting on the floor in a corner of the room, staring at the wall and singing something tuneless, almost wordless. He thought it might have been in Russian, but he couldn’t grasp any of the words.

‘Illya,’ he said, and Illya rocked and sang and twisted his fingers together so that they flushed red and white in blotches, and then said, ‘Napoleon, Napoleon, you’ve come to tell me about the birds again.’

‘Er, no,’ Napoleon said awkwardly, but Illya didn’t respond. Napoleon’s eyes lighted on a comb on the bedside table, and he picked it up and came over to Illya and sat down beside him on the floor. Illya’s hair was ragged and tangled and frayed at the back of his head as if he had spent a long time lying down. It had been washed since his release, but the tangles were still there. So Napoleon sat and gently put a hand on Illya’s shoulder, and said, ‘Illya, may I comb your hair?’

Illya carried on staring at the wall and rocking, so Napoleon gently touched the comb to his hair and started to draw it through the frizzy tangles at the back, easing out one at a time, stroking his other hand over the hair as the comb passed. And gradually Illya stopped rocking, and the strange singing trailed into silence, and then he just said, ‘Napoleon?’

‘Yeah, I’m here,’ Napoleon said gently, not stopping with the combing and the stroking. Illya was still staring at the wall, but it was a blessing that the rocking had stopped. After a little longer he stopped twisting his hands too. Napoleon arranged himself so that his legs were either side of Illya, his body very close to Illya’s back. He felt as if he were protecting him, but he wasn’t sure from what. From himself, perhaps.

‘Oh, Napoleon,’ Illya said, in a kind of sigh.

Napoleon moved the comb around a little to ease out the little tangles at the side of his head, and Illya leant backwards until he was leaning against Napoleon’s body and Napoleon started to carefully comb his fringe. Illya’s head rolled back against Napoleon’s shoulder. His eyes looked heavy and red with tiredness. So Napoleon kept combing and stroking and then he started to sing, something low and sweet and soft that his mother used to sing to him, something he didn’t even know he remembered the words to until he started to sing them.

The nurse came in quietly half an hour later to find Napoleon sitting there, his back aching, his neck aching, his arms around Illya’s chest, and Illya soft and heavy in sleep against him.

‘That’s the most settled I’ve seen him since he came in,’ she whispered, then she asked, ‘Do you want me to get you something to lean on?’

‘Yeah,’ Napoleon whispered back. ‘I think my back is breaking.’

So she managed to trundle the night stand across and wedge it and a pillow between Napoleon and the bed, so that there was something soft for him to lean back on, and she lightly laid a blanket over Illya’s body, and she smiled.

‘How long do you think you can stay like that for?’ she asked.

‘As long as it takes,’ Napoleon said. He had been through torture worse than this, and if it meant that Illya slept soundly and well, then he would sit here for hours. The nurse tiptoed out and he closed his eyes and rested his head back against the pillow behind him, and just waited.

 

((O))

 

Oh, this was a strange world. A very strange world. Illya paced across the small room and paced back again, trying to make sense of the room he was in. There were too many lines, too many things. Different textures, different colours, different shades. There was something in the other little room, something silver and shiny, and it hissed and rattled and spewed shocking cold water when he turned it on. It was a tap. His mind knew that. But he also knew it was a terrible thing, a terrible sound to hear.

He paced away from that little room and over to the blank wall. It was good to look at the blank wall. It calmed him. He stood there for a while and leant his head against the wall, but it was hard and cold and although the blankness was soothing the feeling was not.

He felt a damp heat down his leg as his bladder relaxed, and that snapped him into another level of awareness.

‘Oh, no, no,’ he murmured. ‘No, no, no.’

They didn’t like that. Although they were very kind he knew they didn’t like that, and he didn’t like it either. He knew it was wrong. It was just that he seemed to have forgotten how to make himself wait. It was just another thing to think about, and he could hardly hold two things in his mind right now without becoming terribly stressed by the effort.

He stood there with his foot in a patch of hot wetness, and tried to think of what to do. They didn’t like that. So he pushed the pyjama trousers and underwear off and threw it into that little room where the horrid tap was. Then he went to the door to the great outside and leant against it and tried to work out how to tell someone what he had done. It would be better if they watched him as they had in the white room, but they wouldn’t watch him.

If only Napoleon would come and tell him what to do...

He turned away from the door and knelt down by the wall and leant his head against it, and he drifted into sleep. He woke to the dismayed exclamation of a nurse, and he blinked at her, startled. He felt clearer now. It all made a little more sense. He looked down at his naked lower half and up at the nurse who was looking at the wet patch on the carpet with her hands on her hips, and he said, ‘Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t realise, then it was too late.’

And she schooled her face into a smile and said, ‘That’s all right, Mr Kuryakin. It’s soon mended. I’ll clean it up and get you some new bottoms. Just – try to feel it before it happens next time, yes?’

His smile was one of shame. ‘I’ll try,’ he promised.

She stood there looking at him for a moment longer, then she said, ‘Mr Kuryakin, would you like it if I brought you a book to read?’

He faltered. A book? A thing with pages, with words, with ideas. A book.

‘Yes, that would be nice,’ he replied. ‘And – Napoleon. When will Napoleon be here?’

‘He was here this morning, Mr Kuryakin. He said he’d stop by again later, when he’d finished in the office. Now, when I come back with your bottoms I’ll bring you your lunch and your pills too, and the doctor wants to talk to you after lunch. You can stay in your room, but you’ll have a good talk with him, okay? It’ll help. Be good for you.’

A talk, Illya thought. Perhaps it would be good for him. Perhaps the doctor would be like a man with a torch coming into this twisting and endless labyrinth. Perhaps he would lead him out. And then afterwards there would be Napoleon. Napoleon had led him out of real labyrinths before. Perhaps Napoleon could help lead him out of this one.

 

((O))

 

He rocked back and forth on his feet, standing on the threshold between the bathroom and bedroom. He had his pyjamas on, his top buttoned loosely. He thought the buttons might be wrong, they seemed uneven, and he undid them and started to do them up again. He had to get them right. It seemed so important to get them right. But his fingers were dirty. He left little brown stains on the sides of the shirt. The pristine pearly buttons were getting dirty, and he looked at that dirt in horror. He didn’t know what to do, because he hated the noise of the tap and the feeling of hot or cold water on his skin. It was just too much.

He rocked on his feet again, and then slipped his hand into his trouser pocket to feel what he had in there. It was his, out of his body. It was part of him, still warm. He couldn’t bear the noise of the flush and he couldn’t bear to make part of himself disappear, so he had done it on the floor and picked it up and put it in his pocket. It was warm and strong smelling, primal and good. He remembered lying in the white room and pressing his hand into his shit. They always knocked him out and took it away, they took him away piece by piece.

He was suddenly hit by a tremendous fear. He should have picked them all up, gathered them all. But he had allowed them to flush them, to clean them up and take them away. Oh god, every time he lost a part of himself, and he had let them, he had let them take away those parts of himself. No wonder he was mad. He had let them take him apart piece by piece. Every time his body vented something they took it away, and he fell apart, little by little.

He held his hand around that warm softness in his pocket. He would keep this. He needed to stay together. He needed to stay whole. The birds were circling and if he didn’t watch they would take it away, they would take him away, a finger, an eye, a rib. They would strip him bare, strip him back to just a spine. They were coming now, the birds, all kinds of birds, a big crow at their head, its eyes glittering. Feathers over the ceiling, feathers making a black sky, iridescent with their secret power.

His breath caught and he stepped backwards from the crowding birds, the crowing birds, their songs sharp and sweet and harsh. Perhaps they hid the devil in their wings. There were thrushes singing so shrilly that his head hurt, and he stepped back and back again, and he screamed and screamed and screamed.

They were holding him. He didn’t know what was happening. He was convulsed with terror, and he was being lifted up, he was flying, being carried aloft by the birds. So he screamed some more, because perhaps the screaming would drive them away. He tried to raise his hands and everything smelt of shit, and the birds were clamouring, coming down upon him, and then Napoleon shouted, ‘Illya! Illya!’

He tried to turn left. He twisted his body to try to get left, to get away from the birds. They were tearing him apart in strips, tearing his clothes off him, and then unbearably hot water was on him and he flailed, crying out in terror as his hands were doused in water and his back and between his legs were doused in water.

 _Oh god oh god oh god…_ The birds had him now. They were going to pull out his eyes and pull out his tongue and gouge into his heart. And he heard Napoleon calling, ‘Illya! Illya, stop it, stop it!’

A sting on his arm. Were they pecking him there? He shot his hand onto his arm and strong fingers closed around his wrist, and he flailed and flailed. And then they were strapping something around his wrist and he could hear Napoleon somewhere in the cacophony of birds shouting, ‘Don’t tie him down, don’t tie him down! _No!_ Let me hold him.’

And then arms. God. Warm, strong arms, the roughness of fabric against his naked skin. The birds came back and they draped him in cloth, and he struggled and struggled. The feel of it, the smell of it… Oh, that hospital smell was sharp and made him want to vomit. And then the arms came back and Napoleon’s voice was so close it was almost inside his head, saying, ‘Illya, Illya. It’s all right. I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Illya. Calm down.’

‘But the birds,’ he managed to choke through his throat. His throat was so tight it hurt to force out words. ‘Oh god, the birds...’

‘No birds,’ Napoleon said. ‘The birds have all gone away, Illya. I scared them away.’

‘No, I can see them, I can see them!’

And he raised his head and he could see them, flapping, their sharp curved beaks coming closer. He tried to turn his head to the left, to hide his eyes from their beaks.

‘All right, all right, Illya. Listen, I’ll protect you from the birds. Here.’

And there was a strong hand behind his head, pressing it in against that rough fabric, and more fabric coming over him as Napoleon said, ‘Help me with the blanket. No, just wrap him up.’

Illya hid his face so hard against that rough fabric, and the arms were so strong around him.

‘Just breathe,’ Napoleon said. ‘Just breathe.’

He tried to twist to the left, and the arms let him move a little, but then they held him still again. He opened his eyes a tiny amount and he could see light and yellow walls and a little bit of a grey wool weave in the corner of his vision. The arms still held him, and Napoleon said, ‘Shush. Just breathe. It’s all right. I’ll keep you safe.’

He breathed. He kept breathing. He felt strange and a little sleepy, and he breathed in slowly, and out again. He kept one eye on the yellow painted walls, and it was like coming awake from a nightmare. No birds. He couldn’t see birds. There was a woman on her knees, a nurse, scrubbing at something on the floor. The sound of scrubbing was loud, hyperreal. And a man, a man in a white coat standing there, just watching. And Napoleon’s arms around him, holding him, rocking him a little, his voice saying, ‘Shush, shush,’ like a reflex action.

‘Napoleon?’ he asked, and he looked up a little, and he could see Napoleon’s face at an odd angle. He could see the underneath of his chin and up his nose. Napoleon looked down, and his eyes were so full of worry, but he smiled.

‘Yeah, Illya,’ he said. ‘You’ve been on a bit of a trip, huh?’

‘I – ’ He turned his eyes but not his head, searching warily for the birds that he knew now weren’t there. ‘They’ve gone. They’ve all gone...’

‘Good,’ Napoleon said soothingly. ‘That’s good.’ And his hand stroked on Illya’s back.

‘Mr Solo.’

It was the white coated man speaking. Illya knew him now. He was one of the psychiatrists. He had spent a long time talking to Illya already. Illya heaved in breath and tried to ground himself, clenching his fists hard and looking at the carpet, the wall, Napoleon’s shoulder and face. He made a little distance between himself and Napoleon and the blanket slipped from his body. He was wearing a hospital gown that was loose on his body and open down the back. He suddenly felt so exposed, and he clutched ineffectually at it. Napoleon pulled the blanket back up.

‘Illya, I want to talk with you for a little while,’ the psychiatrist said. Dr Bainbridge. That was his name. He remembered that now. ‘We’ll get you some new pyjamas. I know you don’t like the gown. And then we’ll have a talk.’

‘Napoleon,’ Illya said in a faltering voice.

‘Yeah, I’m here,’ Napoleon said, and his hand was firm on Illya's back. ‘But the doctor needs to talk to you, Illya. Are you okay now? No more birds? Can you let me go?’

Illya looked around, wary again, but he didn’t see any birds, not even feathers. The nurse had got up and was leaving the room, leaving a damp patch on the carpet, carrying with her a smell of disinfectant and shit. He eased his hand out from between him and Napoleon and looked at it, flexing his fingers. His palm was empty. They had taken his pyjamas and taken what was in his pocket. They had taken away a piece of him.

‘Y-you took it away,’ he faltered, and he felt as if he were falling. He was so scared, and his voice shook.

‘Yes,’ Dr Bainbridge said. ‘We had to take it away, Illya, and I want to talk to you about that. I know why you wanted to keep it, but there are some things we can’t keep. I want to sit down and talk to you for a bit, so I’d like Napoleon to leave us alone. He can come back later. Will you talk to me for a while?’

And Illya looked up and stared at him, and then back at Napoleon, and then nodded his head, mumbling, ‘Yes, okay. For a while. But you come back, Napoleon? You come back.’

 

((O))

 

Napoleon stepped out of the room shaking. He felt utterly shell shocked. He had been on his way to visit Illya when he had heard him screaming, and then he had run and got to the door just as Dr Bainbridge and a nurse and a pair of orderlies got there. And there Illya had been, standing in the doorway to the bathroom, his eyes wide with terror, screaming and screaming. The scent of shit had been so thick in the air that he had gagged.

Images flashed before his eyes. Those orderlies grabbing Illya and wrestling him into the bedroom, holding him so hard that he was sure Illya would be covered in bruises. His hand coming out of his pocket covered in shit. Illya’s utter screaming terror as they wrestled with him, stripping off his filthy pyjamas, holding him as he thrashed. Their necks had corded, their muscles bulged as they fought to hold him while the nurse washed him down. That sight of Illya naked and terrified and his hand covered in shit while they fought with him was frozen and branded in his mind. And they had tried to tie him to the bed. God, where had they even got those restraints from that quickly? They were kind, soft, padded leather cuffs, of course, but he couldn’t bear the thought of them strapping him to the bed. Illya had been through that kind of thing at the hands of hostiles too often, and it was entirely possible that in trying to resist he would have killed one of the orderlies.

Napoleon stood there, his chest heaving, leaning against the wall. Thank god he had managed to calm his friend. _His friend_. Had that even been Illya? Could that have been Illya, naked and thin and terrified, his blue eyes so wide, screaming like a madman while they cleaned his shit off his body?

‘Mr Solo. Mr Solo.’

He blinked and stared and saw the nurse who had been in the room with them. She was looking at him with an expression of pity. She held out a cup of coffee and then put her arm around his shoulders and said, ‘Come and sit down, Mr Solo. You’re white as a sheet.’

He felt as if he were tottering.

‘He’s really mad, isn’t he?’ he asked as she led him down the corridor and into a little room. He sat in an armchair without really looking at it. ‘Illya. He’s really insane.’

‘He’s damaged,’ she said softly.

‘He’d filled his pocket with his own faeces,’ Napoleon said. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that he was saying that of Illya. God, god, god…

‘He’s afraid,’ she said. She offered him the coffee again. ‘Why don’t you drink up? You’ll feel better.’

He looked down to see the coffee was rich with cream. He took it and had a sip, and smiled.

‘Thank you,’ he said. Then he said, ‘You’re a psych nurse, aren’t you? Yeah. Well, maybe you understand what just went on in there, but what I saw was my partner, my closest friend, on some kind of crazy freak out, seeing birds that weren’t there and filling his pocket with his own waste. Now, you tell me that he’s not insane.’

She smiled a twisted kind of smile. ‘I can’t, Mr Solo.’

‘Napoleon, please,’ he said. He was too tired for formality.

‘Napoleon. I can’t tell you that. By the definitions we apply here, I guess you’d say he was insane. But even in insanity there’s reasoning, Napoleon. There’s a reason behind whatever he does. He was taken apart in that place. They took everything from him, even control of his own body. He’s terrified of losing a very intimate part of himself because to some extent that is all he has.’

‘So – ’ Napoleon stared at her. ‘Let me get this straight. He’s storing his faeces because – he doesn’t want to lose himself? To – to birds that don’t exist?’

‘It all exists to him. When they’re there they’re there with a vengeance, as real as you or me. Napoleon, he’s on a powerful regime of drugs which will help him, but they’re cumulative. They need time to help. The anti-psychotic will help with his hallucinations and these – well, what you would see as perverted ways of thinking. That and talking to the doctor. Dr Bainbridge is in there now, talking to him. Illya is an incredibly intelligent, incredibly strong person. He fell apart harder because of that, but he’s going to fight harder to get back, too. He _will_ get back.’

‘Are you sure of that?’ Napoleon asked. He saw Illya there again, naked, being wrenched down onto the bed and one of those padded cuffs being buckled around his wrist. He looked down at his own hands and saw that he was still shaking.

‘I would be lying if I told you I knew absolutely that he will be fine,’ she said in a very steady voice. ‘I can’t tell you that. But we’re all fighting with him. He’s having a lot of trouble because of the shock of being released from that place. He was having every moment of his life utterly controlled, even his right to sleep. He must feel like he’s falling right now. We’re trying to give him quite a rigid structure at first, but nothing could be as rigid as what they subjected him to in that cell. We just need to work with him, slowly and gently and carefully, and try to get him back.’

Napoleon slumped back in the armchair, holding his coffee clenched in his hands, but not drinking at all. The vision of Illya haunted him, overlain with what he had seen in those film reels, Illya glassy-eyed and desperate from lack of sleep, hallucinating and babbling and rocking and pacing in that cell. Illya screaming with a panic that filled the tiny space like something solid. He had seen snippets from the full length of his captivity, seen him transform from the strong, bright, shrewd Illya that he knew into this frail, damaged, gibbering creature. And what if he never came back? What had those people done to him?

The strength suddenly went out of him, and the nurse took the coffee cup before he dropped it, and he pressed his hands over his face and wept.

 

((O))

 

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said softly.

His partner was in his bed, covered up to his neck, his arms folded over his chest under the blanket. He looked sleepy, like a sleepy child, and Napoleon couldn’t help but reach out a hand and stroke his golden hair. He looked so vulnerable that he brought forth a great tenderness in Napoleon. Illya blinked blue eyes at him, and smiled.

‘Do you feel a little better?’ Napoleon asked.

Illya stared at him for a moment, then said almost apologetically, ‘There aren’t any birds.’

‘No. No, Illya. There aren’t any birds. Mr Waverly doesn’t allow birds in here.’

The side of Illya’s mouth quirked, but he still looked sleepy. Napoleon suspected they had him on some pretty strong sedatives. It was evening, long past dinner time, and they were trying to get Illya’s sleep cycles back to normal. He had great trouble with insomnia.

‘Are you okay?’ Napoleon asked. He had been so shaken by that awful incident earlier when Illya had been so deep in psychosis. He had needed to work hard just to persuade himself to come back to see Illya now, and he hated himself for that, but he was terrified of seeing him in such an awful state.

‘I’m okay,’ Illya said, and he smiled sleepily, turning his head to look at Napoleon. ‘I scared you, didn’t I?’

‘Well, I – ’ Napoleon began awkwardly.

‘No, no. I scared you. Of course I did. I was scared too.’ His eyes became haunted, and his hands moved restlessly under the blanket. ‘You have no idea how terrifying it is.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Napoleon admitted. ‘I’m glad I don’t.’

‘The doctor gave me a stronger dose of – of – ’ His face clouded. ‘Of whatever it is. The anti-psychotic. I don’t remember the name. I suppose I don’t need to remember the name if it works. I don’t like it. It makes me feel like my head’s stuffed full of cotton wool. But cotton wool’s better than – that.’

Napoleon put a hand on Illya’s arm, feeling his biceps through the sheet and blanket. Illya had lost so much strength. Then Illya pulled his arm out from under the blanket and let Napoleon take his hand. His hand was warm and Napoleon curled his fingers around it, holding on as if he were afraid Illya were going to fall away.

‘You had a good talk with Bainbridge, yes?’ he asked, and Illya’s mouth quirked again.

‘A long talk. A very long talk. It helped.’

‘And you – ’ Napoleon faltered, looked down. He didn’t want to broach that subject, but he felt he had to. He didn’t understand, even after the nurse had spoken to him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to understand. ‘Illya, you had a pocket full of shit, dear,’ he said finally. ‘Why did you do that?’

Illya’s eyes became hooded. He stiffened a little despite the sedatives and the medication.

‘I talked all about that with Dr Bainbridge,’ he said rather defensively. ‘I talked to him for hours.’

‘I know,’ Napoleon said, still holding Illya’s hand, stroking unconsciously over the backs of his fingers. There was a healing wound in the back of his hand from the cannula, and a yellowing bruise around it. Illya seemed calmer when Napoleon stroked him like this. ‘I know you did. I just – I don’t know. I suppose I just fail to understand...’

‘I’m mad,’ Illya said, and there Napoleon could see some of the real twisted humour that characterised Illya so often. ‘I don’t have to make sense.’

‘No, you’re not mad,’ Napoleon began. ‘The nurse told me you have your own kind of logic. That you’re – afraid of losing something of yourself.’

‘I didn’t have anything,’ Illya said, his eyes becoming more veiled for a moment. Then he looked straight at Napoleon with a shocking degree of clarity. Napoleon felt as if he were falling into a void, looking into those eyes. ‘Napoleon, I didn’t have anything. I never saw a face. I never heard a voice. Not a real one. I saw so many things that weren’t there, but whenever it came back to reality there were four white walls and a white floor and a white ceiling. A white jumpsuit on my body and nothing else. They even took my sleep, Napoleon. They took my _sleep_. They were peeling my mind away strip by strip, and it hurt. It hurt so much.’

‘I’m sorry, Illya,’ Napoleon said. ‘I’m so sorry. I was searching for you for all that time... If I’d only gotten there sooner perhaps you wouldn’t be – ’

‘Mad,’ Illya said baldly. ‘Don’t worry, Napoleon.’ And he grinned then, a real Illya grin. ‘ _I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw_.’

Napoleon smiled in response to that. Whatever had been taken from Illya, his polymath’s memory was still intact. But he asked, ‘Is Hamlet really the right role model right now?’

‘Well, I can’t think of any other,’ Illya shrugged. ‘Can you? The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper? No, that was post-partum depression, wasn’t it? I don’t think I’m suffering from that. How about Crime and Punishment? Do you want me to model myself after Rodion Raskolnikov?’

‘I want you to get well,’ Napoleon said. ‘That’s all I want. Not Hamlet or Rodion Raskolnikov. Just you.’

‘I’m not sure where I am,’ Illya said rather brokenly, his slight humour dissipating like vapour. Napoleon held his hand a little harder.

‘You’re here,’ he assured him. ‘You are here, Illya. We just need you to – I don’t know – to be here more.’

‘I’m doing my best,’ Illya said. ‘I’m trying. I – fall into these wells where I’m back there, where I’ve lost everything. I see things and I hear things. And then I come back. I think I’m having more time back than gone. I think I am.’

‘I think you are,’ Napoleon said. He wasn’t honestly sure, but it seemed the most helpful thing to say.

Illya yawned widely then. ‘Oh, Napoleon, I’m so sleepy,’ he murmured. ‘All of a sudden I’m sleepy. Those pills have a kick to them.’

Napoleon brushed a hand over his forehead again, and smiled. ‘You let the pills do their job,’ he said. ‘Go to sleep. It’s half past ten. It’s time all little agents were tucked up in bed.’

‘And you?’ Illya asked. His eyes were half closed. ‘It’s very late.’

Napoleon jerked his head towards the door. ‘I’ll bunk down in one of the rooms here again. That way I’ll be here first thing in the morning, and I’ll come and see you. You’d like that?’

‘Mmmhmm,’ Illya said. ‘Like that. Yes. I’d like that.’

‘All right,’ Napoleon said softly, and he stroked his hand across Illya’s hair again. ‘Then you go to sleep.’

And he started softly singing, half humming, half singing, that song from his childhood that he had dragged out of his memory last time, stroking Illya’s golden hair and stroking his hand, until his eyes fluttered all the way closed and his lips parted a little, letting loose soft, hot breaths. Then Napoleon stood. He bent and laid the lightest of kisses on Illya’s forehead, knowing that Illya would either thump him or give him one of those _looks_ if he were awake. He stood watching the sleeping Russian for a moment, then left the room.

One of the night nurses was in the corridor, and she smiled at him.

‘Sleeping?’ she asked.

‘Like a baby,’ Napoleon said. He let his eyes travel over her trim, curvaceous form, almost by rote, but he was too tired for that, far too tired. He smiled at her and said, ‘I’m off to one of the agents’ rooms. I’ll be back in the morning. Will you be watching him tonight?’

‘For my sins,’ she smiled. He needed someone with him or very close by when he slept because he woke from such terrible nightmares. Napoleon felt guilty for not being able to perform the duty himself, but he just had to sleep.

‘Just make sure he knows I’ll be back in the morning. Goodnight, Elise.’

And she rose up on her tiptoes and kissed him briefly on the cheek. He didn’t even feel his libido stir a millimetre. He really was tired.

‘Goodnight,’ she told him, and he left.

 

((O))

 

Napoleon came in through Illya’s door tentatively, holding the little black case in his hand. He hoped Illya wouldn’t mind him going to his apartment, hoped he wouldn’t mind him fetching this. He hoped that it would help, and Dr Bainbridge had agreed that it might.

Illya was awake when he came in, sitting in his bed with a book in his hands. Napoleon was sure he wasn’t reading. He was just looking at the book, like a man who had seen photos of people reading but had no idea what to do. He no longer had the drip in his arm, at least, and there was a little more colour in his face, but the hands that held the book were shaking. The nurse had whispered to Napoleon outside not to worry about how his hands were shaking. It was the medication. The medication was helping him, but it did cause tremors.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said, and Illya’s head jerked up.

‘Napoleon!’ he said, and real joy lit his face.

Napoleon laid the rectangular case on the bed, and waited. Illya stared at it for a moment, and then his lips parted.

‘My English horn?’

‘I thought you might like it,’ Napoleon said. He sat down in the visitor’s chair and nodded towards the case. ‘Why don’t you open it up?’

Illya’s face fell. ‘Oh – no, Napoleon,’ he said diffidently. He held up his hands, and the tremors were small, but uncontrollable. ‘I couldn’t. Look at me.’

‘The doctor thought it might help,’ Napoleon told him. ‘He said it was very likely that your hands wouldn’t shake while you were playing.’

Illya ran his fingers over the black case. There was something odd in his eyes, something Napoleon wasn’t sure of. It was as if he were seeing something that only he could see.

‘If you really want me to I’ll take it home again,’ he offered.

‘No,’ Illya said, wrapping his arms around the case and holding it to his body. ‘No,’ he said again. ‘Not my case. No. It’s mine.’

‘O-kay,’ Napoleon said uncertainly. He remembered Illya storing his faeces in his pocket, because that was his too, and he shuddered. Illya was a little better now, but that memory haunted Napoleon. With all the will in the world, he still didn’t know how to interact with Illya while he was like this. He wanted to just hold him and make it better, but there was no way to soothe his mind. He just didn’t know how.

‘Illya,’ he said, but Illya didn’t seem to be there. He was holding the case and rocking gently back and forth. He started to hum broken bars of some piece of classical music that Napoleon thought he vaguely recognised. Napoleon rubbed a hand over his eyes. He didn’t know where to look. The doctor hadn’t expected Illya to just take out the horn and assemble it and start playing, so Napoleon hadn’t either, but he hated that bringing this in for him seemed to have sent him into this isolated state.

‘Illya,’ he said. ‘Would you rather I left you alone?’

Illya jerked then, and a fleeting expression of panic passed over his face.

‘No, Napoleon,’ he said quickly. ‘No. I’m sorry. I’m here. I am here.’ He shoved the small case under the blanket and pushed it down against his thigh. ‘I’m here, Napoleon. What were you saying?’

Napoleon smiled gently. ‘Nothing, Illya. I wasn’t saying anything. What were you reading when I came in?’

‘Oh...’ Illya picked up the book and looked at the cover. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t, really… I don’t know.’

Napoleon took the book and turned it towards him. _Jack London. The Call of the Wild_ , he read. A sudden inspiration took him.

‘Illya, would you like me to read to you?’

Illya’s eyes lightened. ‘Would you?’ he asked. ‘Would you do that, Napoleon?’

Napoleon smiled. ‘Of course I would.’

He opened the book and started to read, and Illya lay against his pillows and listened. His eyes were unfocussed and far away, but somehow Napoleon could tell that he was listening to every word. And after a while Illya drew the black case out from under the blanket, and he opened it, and with trembling hands he took out the pieces from their velvet nests and started to fit them together. He licked his lips and bit them into his mouth, and sat there with the horn on his lap, his eyes on the dark polished wood and shining metal.

‘It’s better if you make the reed yourself,’ he said, his eyes on the instrument.

Napoleon stopped reading and folded the book closed over his finger. ‘Huh?’

Illya’s eyes flickered up. ‘The reed’s made of bamboo,’ he said. ‘You can get them, but it’s better to make them yourself. You get the right sound. You need the right sound. It’s like a human voice. All different.’

‘I didn’t know that, Illya,’ Napoleon said. ‘Then you fit the reed in the top, yes?’

Illya grunted, preoccupied with fiddling with the reed. ‘The reed goes right into the bocal, and the bocal fits in here, here at the top.’ And he lifted a little bent metal tube and fitted it to the top of the horn, then slipped the reed into the other end. ‘Need it to make _my_ sound. It’s not someone else’s. It’s mine.’

‘It’s a beautiful instrument, Illya,’ Napoleon said. He wasn’t sure what else to say.

And Illya pressed his lips together and then lifted the instrument to his mouth, and his hands were shaking, but as he blew a note Napoleon saw the tendons tighten, running to his fingers, and the trembling lessened and almost stilled.

Illya stopped and shook his head. ‘I need a new reed,’ he said.

‘Well, could I buy you one?’ Napoleon began, but Illya shook his head furiously.

‘I told you. It’s better to make them. I can’t make one here. I can’t. I haven’t got the things. I don’t think they’d let me have a knife, would they? No knives in the madhouse.’

‘Illya,’ Napoleon began softly. He couldn’t read Illya at the moment, couldn’t tell when he was being serious and when he was using his normal acerbic wit.

‘It’s all right,’ Illya murmured. ‘This will do. It’ll have to do...’

And he put the reed between his lips again and started to play, and the first few notes were tentative, but then the room was filled with such a warm, rich sound that tears welled in Napoleon’s eyes. It was the start of the New World Symphony. He recognised it. There was something slightly shaky in the way he played, but he could tell that normally Illya must be an exceptional musician. He wondered why he had never asked Illya to play for him before, why Illya had never offered. It was such a beautiful sound, and it felt like such a private thing, as if Illya were peeling back his skin and letting Napoleon see inside his soul.

He was entranced. And then the music faded away, and Napoleon started, coming back to life. Illya had laid the horn down and his hands were shaking again, and he was crying. Gently Napoleon took the horn and laid it across the end of the bed, then he held Illya in his arms while the sobs jerked out of him. He felt as if he were standing in the face of a flood, holding Illya while the waters raged around them, trying desperately to stop him from being washed away.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he murmured against Illya’s ear. His body felt so thin and he was so tight against Napoleon’s body, shaking so hard with the sobs.

‘I’m so scared,’ Illya whispered.

‘I know,’ Napoleon told him, rocking him gently. ‘I know. But you’ll be all right. We’ll make you all right.’

 

((O))

 

He was on his own again, on his own in the little room. He lay in the bed and drifted into sleep, and then woke with a jerk. His body was betraying him. He had learnt that if he fell asleep he must wake up quickly. The sedatives made him sleep for longer, but that wasn’t a natural sleep, not a good sleep, and he drifted in and out and never felt rested. The better he got the more insomnia troubled him, and that was so stupid after he had spent so long not allowed to sleep, desperately craving sleep.

He slipped his legs over the edge of the bed and felt the carpet under his feet. All those sensations were odd, all strange, all new. He moved his toes on the carpet and felt the pile against his skin.

Oh, he felt so restless. Some of the pills made him sleepy, some made him slow, but his hands shook when he tried to use them and his mouth was dry and he felt so odd.

He paced into the little bathroom and stared at the basin, at the tap. He wanted to splash water on his face. He remembered doing that, long ago, to refresh himself. But he didn’t dare. He didn’t dare open himself up to so much sensation. The idea was terrifying.

He padded to the door of his room instead and opened it just a crack. Outside it was bright. The walls were creamy yellow. He stood there staring through the gap, trying to make his eyes adjust to the length of the corridor. He hadn’t been out of this room. The nurses and doctors came to him, the psychiatrist came to him, Napoleon came to him. And somehow now it was hard to judge distance. He had been staring at closeness for so long that nothing beyond a certain point seemed to be three dimensional. It was all flat, like a painting on a wall.

He pushed the door open a little further. He ran his fingers over the triangular badge that he wore on his pyjama pocket, the one with his number on it, the one they kept saying he must wear, that he remembered he must wear. And he stepped out into the corridor.

Oh, this was strange. He felt sick. He put one foot in front of another, moved forward. As he got closer to the two dimensional distance it started to morph into three dimensions, but whatever was further away was still flat. The sight of the walls moving past him on either side made him dizzy. He put his hands up on either side of his face, blinkering himself like a horse, although his hands shook and rattled against his skin. This was like putting out to sea on a raft made of grass. But he had to get better. He had to push himself. He had been in this room for days. Not as long as that other room, he thought, but for a long time.

It was very quiet. There was no one in the corridor. When he got to the end and went through the doors the yellow walls turned to white and the carpet turned to linoleum that was cold and startling under his feet. He almost whimpered, but he didn’t. He didn’t. He kept walking. There was a nurse at the reception desk talking to someone, and she didn’t see him. Illya made himself small and quiet, and went out through the doors.

Instantly he was afraid he had made a mistake. The light was bright above him and the walls were harsh and the floor was cold. But it was quiet, thank god. He put one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other. His feet knew where to go. He hardly knew himself where he was going, but he walked into a tiny room, an elevator, and pushed a button, and for a short moment he felt secure with those four plain walls close around him. Then the doors opened again and he got out, and he kept putting one foot in front of the other.

And then there was a door in front of him and he opened it and walked in, and the scent was so familiar that he stood there, gasping. Everything was so familiar but it was like looking at a jumble of dissociated images all clamouring for his attention. It was too much. It was all too much. Something swelled over him. He couldn’t see, he could only see the whiteness of walls pressing in towards him and the ceiling peeled down and came towards his head, and the walls were pressing his lungs and he was screaming, trying to scream, trying to scream...

 

((O))

 

Napoleon glanced up idly as the office door opened. It wasn’t going to be Geoff; he was out on a mission. But he didn’t expect who he saw. He didn’t expect Illya, standing there in the doorway in pyjamas and bare feet, his eyes like saucers, his shaking hands shielding the sides of his face.

Napoleon was just standing up when Illya’s mouth opened and his eyes widened still further, and suddenly he was screaming, putting his arms protectively over the top of his head, crouching to the floor, his voice cracking and his breath coming in gasps.

‘Illya! Christ, Illya,’ he said, coming from behind his desk in a few short strides and crouching to grab hold of Illya’s shoulders. The Russian was shaking, his arms clenched over his head, and he was garbling something about being crushed.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said, ‘ _Illya_ . Listen to me, Illya. It’s Napoleon. _Listen to me!_ ’

There were thudding footsteps and someone barged into the room, gun drawn, and Napoleon snapped furiously, ‘ _Get out!_ ’

Startled, the man held up his hands in apology, holstered his gun, and withdrew. Napoleon felt a moment of remorse, but he didn’t want anyone seeing Illya like this. He knew if Illya were in his right mind he would hate it too, and in this state another person in the room would only increase his panic.

Illya was gasping and gasping, but then slowly he grew still, some of the tension eased out of his arms, and Napoleon helped him to lower them.

‘Illya,’ he said again, putting a hand on Illya’s chin to direct his gaze, so that instead of looking at everything around him he was just looking at Napoleon.

‘N-Napoleon,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘The walls – the walls were coming in...’

‘The walls are right where they’re supposed to be,’ Napoleon said softly. ‘Look, Illya. Four walls, right where they’re supposed to be.’

Illya looked up flinchingly, then winced and turned his eyes downward again. He dropped out of the crouch so he was sitting on the floor. Napoleon looked around then took Illya by the shoulders and turned him on the carpet so he was facing the plainest part of the room, the wall on the right. Then he angled himself so that Illya was looking at him, and so if he did look around him he only saw the blank wall.

‘Illya, look at me,’ he said. ‘The walls are right where they should be, okay?’

Illya nodded stiffly. ‘Y-yes,’ he said. He looked bewildered. ‘I thought – ’

‘Illya, does anyone know you’re up here? I guess not,’ he decided, looking at Illya’s bare feet and his half-buttoned pyjama top. ‘You just walked out of medical, huh?’

Some part of him was pleased at that. It was so like Illya to just leave because he wanted to leave, regardless of medical opinion. It was a tiny part of what Illya had always been.

‘Sit there,’ he said, pressing a hand on Illya’s shoulder. ‘Just keep your eyes on the wall.’

Then he stood and went to the intercom and put a call through to medical, where a flustered nurse admitted that they had just discovered Illya was missing.

Napoleon came back to sit cross-legged in front of Illya on the carpet.

‘Well, this is nice, huh?’ he asked. ‘A little party, just you and me. What made you come up here, Illya?’

Illya shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He was looking down at his legs, at the bare floor. He looked confused. ‘I thought – I thought I should try to – I don’t know – ’

‘Missing me, are you?’ Napoleon asked, and was relieved when Illya almost laughed.

‘Maybe,’ Illya said. ‘I didn’t think I’d seen you today.’

‘Ah,’ Napoleon said. He had sat with Illya for four hours that morning, doing paperwork in his room, and mixing his work with occasional chatter whenever Illya drifted out of his odd mental isolation. He had left when Illya had fallen asleep after lunch, then come back later for a while. Now it was almost ten p.m.. He had taken to sleeping in the agents’ rooms a lot of nights just so he could be on hand, because his presence seemed to help Illya so much.

‘What day do you think it is, Illya?’ he asked.

Illya shrugged. He was cross-legged too, and he had started to fiddle with the bottom of one of the pyjama legs with his fingers, occasionally stroking along the sole of one bare foot.

‘Yesterday, today, tomorrow,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t break up properly.’

‘Well, I came to see you this morning, Illya,’ he told him patiently. ‘I sat with you and I did my work, and we ate lunch together. Then you went to sleep. I came back in – er – about five and stayed a little while, but you went off to sleep again so I went to get dinner, then I came up here to do some work.’

‘You did?’ Illya asked, his forehead creasing. His blue eyes were so clear they were like depthless pools.

Napoleon nodded with a wry smile. ‘I did. It’s almost ten at night now.’

‘Oh,’ Illya said. He rubbed a hand over his forehead. ‘I don’t know. I don’t seem to be able to break up time properly.’

There was a soft knock on the office door, and Napoleon looked up and called quietly, ‘Come in.’

It was Dr Barker, one of the night staff, and he entered with a worried look on his face.

‘Illya,’ he said. ‘You really shouldn’t leave the infirmary at the moment.’

Illya kept looking at the wall and Napoleon, as if afraid that another face would be too much. He opened his mouth, but said nothing. A look of pain and confusion passed in his eyes.

‘Just a little evening stroll,’ Napoleon said, putting a hand on Illya’s arm. ‘Illya, are you okay to go back down now?’

Illya closed his eyes tightly and shuddered. He folded his arms around his body.

‘I think he found it a little overwhelming,’ Napoleon said apologetically.

‘Well,’ Dr Barker said, crouching down next to Illya. ‘Listen, Illya. I’m going to give you a little injection. It’s just a slightly stronger sedative, nothing to worry about. That will make things easier. Are you happy with that?’

Illya hesitated, then nodded, and Napoleon wondered what the doctor would have done if he had said no. Probably give him the sedative anyway. He hated the idea of Illya being drugged against his will.

‘Napoleon, can you come down with him?’ the doctor asked. ‘You seem to be a calming influence.’

Napoleon glanced at the paperwork still on his desk, and sighed. It was really time to turn in anyway.

‘Give me a moment,’ he said.

He pressed Illya’s arm once, then got up and started to sort out his papers. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the doctor rolling up Illya’s sleeve and slipping a needle into his arm, and a perceptible relaxation crept over the Russian.

‘All right, I’m all done here,’ he said, locking the filing cabinet. He came back to Illya. ‘Come on, tovarisch. Let’s get you back to bed.’

Illya looked at him, and his eyes were unfocussed. Napoleon hated seeing him like that. He hated it so much. But Illya stood up and took hold of his arm, clinging to him like a child to a parent, and Napoleon slipped an arm around his back and walked with him. He gave his key to the doctor and said, ‘Would you lock up?’ then waited a moment in the corridor while the doctor turned the key in the lock then slipped it back into Napoleon’s pocket.

‘All right, Illya,’ Napoleon said, nudging him forwards. ‘Time for beddy-byes.’

Illya lolled against his shoulder. Whatever the doctor had given him, it was strong, but if it stopped Illya from being overtaken by hallucinations, perhaps it was worth it. He hoped that it would help him go to sleep, because Napoleon was tired too, and he didn’t want to have to sit with Illya for hours. He had spent part of the evening watching through those film reels of Illya’s captivity. It was awful to watch Illya’s slow and steady deconstruction into madness, awful to see the misery and degradation of his isolation, and every time he watched those reels he found himself exhausted. When he slept, he dreamt about them, saw Illya behind his eyelids, crying and rocking and utterly undone. He was afraid that before all this was through he would need counselling too.

‘Are you staying here tonight, Napoleon?’ the doctor asked.

‘Yeah, I was planning to,’ Napoleon said. ‘The agent’s room is becoming a little home from home, to tell the truth.’

‘You’re a good friend, Napoleon, and a good partner,’ Dr Barker said, and Illya said slurringly, ‘Napol’yon’s th’best friend.’

Napoleon squeezed him a little with the arm around his back. Friendship was a warm thing, but still, he hated this. He hated seeing Illya in this state, and with no guarantee that he would recover. It was like watching a loved one with a terrible illness, waiting for a cure and never knowing if one would be found.

 

((O))

 

When Illya looked back on how he had used to be, he felt ashamed. He remembered times when he had lain in his own waste because he had forgotten he was no longer diapered, had forgotten how to use the toilet, had forgotten that control of his own body was something that mattered. He remembered how he had stood there passively and let someone else wash him, shave him, brush his teeth, attend to every intimate necessity of hygiene. He remembered lying in bed for hours staring at the ceiling, Napoleon in the room with him trying to eke some kind of response, but being so distracted by hallucinations or fatigue or the grimness of his own situation that he had barely known his partner was there. He remembered hours and hours and hours of talking to the psychiatrist, of facing his own reality, of crying or screaming or huddling around himself because he had been sent so close to madness that he almost couldn’t get back.

‘You didn’t tell them a thing, you know,’ Napoleon said, and Illya blinked and looked up at him.

‘Huh?’

Napoleon was sitting in the chair next to him. They were both in chairs, in armchairs in the patients’ recreation room, with coffee on the table before them, and a selection of pastries that Napoleon had brought in, and this was almost like normality. Illya was wearing slacks and a polo shirt instead of pyjamas and slippers, and although the fabric felt harsh and rough on his skin it was good to be dressed properly again.

‘I’ve watched through all the reels they took from the place where they had you,’ Napoleon said. ‘Well, through everything that was deemed sensitive,’ he amended. There had been two months’ worth of film, and no single man could sit through all of that. In the end it had been necessary to split the job between a select group of people. ‘You didn’t once say anything that compromised U.N.C.L.E.. Not one thing, not in English, not in Russian, not in any other language – and let me tell you, you used quite a few,’ he added with a smile.

Illya felt a small glow of pride that helped somewhat against the pall of shame.

‘I didn’t?’ he asked.

Napoleon smiled. ‘You talked to me a lot, or your imaginary version of me, who seemed to be some kind of obsessive ornithologist. You babbled about all sorts. But nothing about U.N.C.L.E.. Not one thing. By the looks of their records they thought they were close. They were planning on some kind of interrogation. But we got there in time.’

Illya gave a wan smile. ‘They would have done it,’ he said. ‘They would have succeeded. There was hardly anything left of me.’

Napoleon shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Illya. I really don’t know. Apparently you had their Dr Malta so frustrated he threw a typewriter through a window. He said – ah, what was it?’ Napoleon tilted his head back in thought. ‘ _I have never had a subject who has taken so long to be broken down. This one’s stubbornness drives me to the wall_.’

‘Well,’ Illya said.

He fiddled with one of the treats on his plate, flaking off shard after shard of translucent pastry. He hadn’t managed to stop the fiddling yet. He had always been a fiddler anyway, but at the moment it was intense. When he didn’t fiddle, his hands shook. The medication did that. The medication made him feel like a malfunctioning robot, but it was slowly being reduced.

‘I must have cost them a lot of money to no end,’ he said brightly then, and Napoleon grinned.

‘All in all, you cost them about $300,000, my friend,’ he said. ‘Although I guess they saved a considerable amount in pension plans since I killed five of them in getting you out.’

Illya shook his head. ‘Thrush don’t do pension plans, do they? They do the gold watch and a quick assassination.’

‘Well, there is that...’

There was a perverse pleasure in thinking that he had cost Thrush all that money. They wouldn’t be pleased with Dr Malta. They were never pleased with failures. That meant a lot of top Thrush personnel must spend a lot of time being very unhappy.

He had never seen that man’s face. He had only heard about him through what Napoleon had told him. He couldn’t even visualise him. But he knew him now as the puppet master behind this whole thing, the cruel mind that had forced him into that room, that had ordered the buzzer sounded every time he fell asleep, ordered the utter isolation and the white food and the lack of any kind of toilet facilities. He was the man who had watched him being taken apart and had never, at any point, shown any degree of mercy. He hoped that Thrush Central were slowly flaying him, inch by inch.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said, and Illya realised that he was slowly showering the table and carpet in flakes of pastry. He clenched his fists quickly.

‘I bought them to eat, but if you prefer to deconstruct things...’ Napoleon began.

‘I’m sorry,’ Illya said. He opened his hand and looked at the tips of his fingers, all sticky with sugared pastry. ‘I just don’t know I’m doing it.’

‘You should see if you can spend some time in the lab,’ Napoleon suggested, and Illya smiled.

‘I’m going to,’ he said, ‘just as soon as this wears off.’

He held out his hands, flat and splayed, and the shaking was vicious. He couldn’t do anything in the labs with hands like that, nothing practical.

‘It’s all the medication,’ he said. ‘All that damn medication.’

‘Is it such a big price to pay?’ Napoleon asked softly.

Illya shook his head. No, it wasn’t really. It drove him mad, the shaking. It drove him mad that he had to have his cup only half full and that when he used a fork the food fell off. But perhaps it was a small price for his sanity. The hallucinations and delusions were almost gone. He was able to cope with more than one other person in a room with him at a time. He could hold full conversations. Yesterday he had even gone up to the roof of the building with Napoleon and he had breathed fresh air and looked out over the city, and he hadn’t succumbed to any kind of breakdown of his control. That had been the most amazing moment, better than the most expensive meal in the best restaurant or a visit to the most exotic location in the world. Just standing there able to tolerate the breeze on his face and the many random noises from the street below and the sheer depth and jigsawed visual variation of the vista around him was the most precious thing in the world. When a flock of birds had flown over he had stood there and stared at them, amazed.

‘I’m going to start back in the labs first,’ he told Napoleon. ‘I’ve discussed it with Waverly. I’m already using the time to catch up on my journals and research. Once I can use my hands properly I’ll go down to the labs and see what I can contribute there. I’ve been promised a quiet working space. I’ll be able to cope with that. And I’ll increase my hours in the office, catch up on what I’ve missed.’ He looked up at Napoleon then. ‘How are you getting on with McKellan?’

‘Hah,’ Napoleon huffed a laugh. ‘He’s not you, Illya. Who could be? But he’s okay. I’ll be forever grateful for him on the helicopter when we were getting you out. He’s been – stolid, anyway. But he’s not you.’

‘I’m going to get back there,’ Illya said with a determination he wished he could show more deeply. He knew it was there, somewhere, fiery and hot, but the drugs dulled everything so much. It was hard to raise passion. ‘I _am_ going to get back there. I promise.’

And Napoleon reached out and closed his hands around Illya’s, and the shaking stopped instantly, miraculously, every tremor stilled against Napoleon’s palms and fingers.

‘I know you will,’ he said.

Illya looked down at his hands, and laughed. ‘Are you going to hold my hands twenty four hours a day?’ he asked. ‘So they don’t shake?’

Napoleon grimaced. ‘Even friendship has its limits, tovarisch. Besides, you can’t do much with them like that.’

He released Illya’s hands again, and instantly the shaking resumed. Illya picked up his cup of coffee in both hands and brought it to his mouth. It clashed against his teeth and a little spilled onto his shirt, and he said, ‘Damn.’

Napoleon brought out a handkerchief and wiped up the drops. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

‘No, I know,’ Illya replied. He spilt things all the time.

‘Listen, do you want to come for a walk?’ Napoleon asked. ‘I mean, not just up to the roof. Somewhere else. I saw Dr Bainbridge on the way in, and he told me it would be okay, as long as you stay with me and you’re back by dinner.’

Illya lifted an eyebrow. ‘Freedom?’ he asked with a slightly twisted smile. ‘I’m being let out of the asylum? Am I safe to mix with normal people?’

‘Don’t be silly, Illya,’ Napoleon said, but Illya could see his discomfort.

‘You know, Napoleon, that cynicism is in my blood,’ he reminded him. ‘I would like to come for a walk, thank you. It would be very pleasant.’

 

((O))

 

Illya’s hands shook just as much in the open air as they did inside. He shoved his hands in his pockets because he was so conscious of how he looked. But it was pleasant to be out there, just out there under the open sky. They walked very slowly along the sidewalk and Illya kept his eyes forward, not daring to look sideways and let his eyes get caught by the stream of traffic. It would be like falling into a river in flood.

‘ How are you doing?’ Napoleon asked, and he said, ‘Fine.’

His breathing was steady, he was aware of where he was. All the moving objects in the sides of his vision, the traffic stream and the building façades he was walking past, threatened to start bleeding and twisting in on him, but he just kept looking straight ahead.

‘ You look like you’re walking a tightrope,’ Napoleon commented.

Illya almost laughed. ‘I think I am,’ he said. ‘I’m all right. I just need to keep looking forwards. There’s too much to the sides.’

He stopped on the sidewalk and took in a deep breath and raised his head a little.

‘ You okay?’ Napoleon asked in concern.

‘ Yes,’ he said.

He stood there and turned rigidly to look across the street as another car passed and two women walked along the sidewalk opposite, in brightly coloured clothes and hats. He forced himself to watch that movement and colour. It was all right. He felt as if all those things were itching in his brain, but it was all right. The walls of the buildings weren’t curling in on him, the ground was stable.

He turned back to their direction of travel, and started to walk again. They walked to the end of the block, and Napoleon nudged him to the left. Illya was concentrating far too hard on keeping himself steady to even question him. They walked on, and then turned again. Walked and turned. And then Illya saw the familiar façade of the tailor’s shop appearing on his left side, and he felt as if an elastic band around his chest had snapped and he could breathe again.

‘We’re back,’ he said. He felt ridiculously close to hysteria, but he had to hold it in.

‘We’re back,’ Napoleon confirmed. ‘Just once around the block. Enough for today, I think.’

They walked down the steps into the tailor’s shop and Illya forced himself to meet Del Floria’s eyes and nod in return to his greeting almost as if he were normal, although Del Floria was quite aware that he ‘wasn’t well,’ as Napoleon had put it. They walked back into the reception and Illya took his badge, and when his trembling hand knocked it back onto the desk the smiling receptionist carefully slipped it onto his breast pocket herself.

It was an enormous relief to be back in the familiar little room in the Psych department and Illya flung himself into the chair in there while Napoleon dropped casually onto the bed and plumped the pillows.

Illya lolled his head sideways and objected, ‘That’s my bed,’ and Napoleon grinned and said, ‘Finders keepers. You’re not using it, so I thought I would.’

Illya leant his head back and sighed. He felt enormously tired, and all the images he had seen, the sounds and smells he had encountered, were threatening to rush in on him. But he was keeping it at bay, so far. He was managing. Perhaps tomorrow he would be able to go out again, to go further.

‘ Are you okay, Illya?’ Napoleon asked seriously.

‘ Yes,’ he said. ‘Just trying to process it all. It takes time.’

There was a soft knock at the door and one of the nurses came in and said, ‘Time for your medication, Illya, and then you must have dinner. Oh, Mr Solo, will you be eating too?’

Napoleon favoured her with one of his most winning smiles and said, ‘Will we be graced with your charming company?’

Illya gave him a withering look, and at the same time the nurse said, ‘I’m afraid not, Mr Solo. You’ll have to make do with Illya’s charms. I’m sure you’ll manage.’

Illya took the tablets with undisguised disgust, but he knew that they were helping him, so he swallowed them down. Every day he was a little better, and the doctor thought that with continued intensive therapy he might be able to go home within two weeks. He wouldn’t be better; the doctor was at pains to make him understand that. But he might not need the twenty-four hour presence of nurses and doctors. Right now he couldn’t imagine coping at home. He couldn’t imagine being alone in the box of his apartment without anyone to come to him when he panicked or when he was lost in psychosis. He certainly couldn’t imagine managing the journey from his apartment to headquarters to continue his counselling, since he couldn’t drive and being in the streets was so hard, psychologically. He remembered how he had been in that room, rolling on the floor, sobbing, screaming at things that only he could see, and the thought of reverting to that was like a cold hand clenched around his guts. When he thought of the future, he was afraid.

 


End file.
